Italian Butter Cookies

chasing ghosts & ancestors through butter, sugar & flour

My first love will always be Brooklyn and New York City. It’s a constant even though all I know and love about it has changed. I wish I’d been able to understand that before I moved seven years ago. At the time, every place I turned reminded me of what no longer existed. So I left thinking I could escape the inescapable—my memories.

What I now realize is Brooklyn and I just needed some space, not a divorce. Neither of us got a fair shake in the madness of my grief. Now I spend many a night searching sites, looking for affordable rentals in NYC, dreaming of one day finding a small flat where I can seek refuge and balance from the isolation and frustration of living up here.

Had I never left NYC, though, this recipe for Italian Butter Cookies might’ve never come about. I would’ve never thought to make these when I lived in Brooklyn because I always bought them from Court Pastry. The “S” cookie from that shop, a faint cinnamon-scented vanilla cookie, was the first cookie both of my girls ate as babies. Not exactly a teether by pediatrician standards, but most definitely one by a Brooklyn-raised  Italian mama and nana’s.

Above is what Court Pastry looked like in the 1940s. I found the photo on this website recently, and took a photo stroll through the streets where my family grew up in Carroll Gardens. My nana was a single parent at the time, raising four kids while working in a factory making hair notions and terry cloth bath wraps. Like many Italian-Americans, my nana wasn’t a widow, my grandfather and her just didn’t believe in divorce, so they lived apart and he came around when my mother and her siblings needed discipline. 

I can still see my nana, Jennie, sitting at the kitchen table in her apartment on Union Street, bundling tickets from her day’s work. She always had rubber bands on her wrists for this purpose. Whenever I find myself with a rubber band on my own wrist, I’m two or three years old again, looking at her with my mousy brown messy hair, wearing footie pajamas. 

Fridays were her beauty parlour day, and on the way home she’d always stop at Court Pastry to bring home saviordi cookies for me and my sister. A few years ago, feeling very nostalgic for Court Pastry, I decided to add these Italian Butter Cookies to my holiday cookie tins. Maybe I couldn’t go home, but I could bring home here in a tiny, sweet way. 

What I love most about making these cookies is that they look extravagant but are actually incredibly easy to make provided you have two essential tools— a pastry bag and the correct size tip. The tips I use are 1M and 4B. They’re larger than the tip sizes you’d use for cake decorating but also easy enough to order online or pick up at any craft store that sells baking supplies. To make cookies as pictured and written in the recipe below, the dough is used immediately while it’s still soft and malleable. If you don’t have a pastry bag and tips, or just prefer to bake cutout cookies, you can do that, too. Just wrap the dough in plastic film and chill until it’s firmed up enough to roll and cut out into rounds or other shapes.

For the melted chocolate, I use bars of Ghiradelli 60% bittersweet chocolate, and prefer a double-boiler method for melting it instead of using the microwave. I find microwaves to be great for melting smaller amounts of chocolate but for this quantity, it all-too-easily goes from not melted to burnt, you know? Raspberry and apricot jam are traditional flavors for the filling if you’re making a sandwich-style cookie, but the beauty of baking these at home is you can use whatever flavor you want, so feel free to experiment. 

As for my own cookie marathon this month, I’m getting close to the finish line. When the baking is done and the last tins are filled and shipped, I’m always left feeling a little sad that it’s done. My holiday baking gives me both a feeling of purpose and peace. Michael always wanted me to open a bakery but I never wanted to work those kinds of hours and be away from him and the girls when they were babies. And for me, baking isn’t transactional like that, at least not this time of year. These holiday cookies are so much more—they’re my past and present in every bite.

—xo,j.

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