\u201cThose are traditional Italian cookies, you know,\u201d \u00a0the clerk said \u2014 a young man I would judge, on the basis of accent, to be Russian. \u00a0\u201dI know,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd I miss the big traditional butter cookies you used to have, the ones that were plain or half covered in chocolate,\u201d I added, going a step too far.<\/p>\n
I was purchasing the cookies for my last day of class, wanting my students to have the taste. For reasons unclear to me, I had scoped through a series of Italian bakeries in the Village the day before, noting each time things missing that should have been there: \u00a0pignolis fully covered in nuts; fig cookies as the Christmas season moves on, those large butter cookies which tended to be eaten after the fancier ones were gone, being simple, but simply delicious. \u00a0My reasons must have had to do with some desire to regain my past, Proust-like, in the taste of a cookie.<\/p>\n
When the Russian young man confided in me that the simpler biscuits I\u2019d purchased were \u201ctraditional Italian cookies,\u201d a whole lot came together. \u00a0The Italians who used to bake the cookies are gone now \u2014 to colleges and engineering jobs and to firms on Wall Street. \u00a0The desire for the authentic Italian cookie or hero can drive us to frenzy \u2014 as anyone who has visited Torrisi Brothers or Little Italy on a weekend will know. \u00a0But traditional Italian cookies? \u00a0More often than not, they\u2019re gone now too or mingled with a Spanish or Russian twist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThose are traditional Italian cookies, you know,\u201d \u00a0the clerk said \u2014 a young man I would judge, on the basis of accent, to be Russian. \u00a0\u201dI know,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd I miss the big traditional butter cookies you used to have, the ones that were plain or half covered in chocolate,\u201d I added, going a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,23,31,57],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.jackmakesthings.com\/tor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}