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Corn Meal Cakes
(Pasta di farina gialla) Corn meal, seven and a half ounces, Wheat flour, five and a half ounces, Granulated sugar, five and a half ounces, Butter, three and a half ounces, Lard, two ounces, A pinch of anise seed, One egg.
Mix together the corn meal, the flour and the anis seed and knead with the butter, the lard and the egg that quantity that you can, forming a loaf that you will put aside. What remains is to be kneaded with water forming another loaf.
Then mix the two loaves and knead a little, not much because the dough must remain soft. Flatten with the rolling pin until it becomes one quarter of an inch thick, sprinkle with flour, and cut in different sizes and shapes with thin stamps.
Grease a baking tin with lard, sprinkle, with flour, glaze with the egg, bake and dust with powdered sugar.
Six eggs, 191
A firm Italian biscuit dough — closer to a sturdy shortbread than a cake — flavoured with anise and rolled thin for cutters. The weights convert cleanly and the method is straightforward once you sort out the two-stage kneading.
- Weights in cupsCorn meal 7.5 oz is about 1 1/2 cups; wheat flour 5.5 oz about 1 1/4 cups; sugar 5.5 oz about 3/4 cup; butter 3.5 oz is 7 tablespoons; lard 2 oz is a scant 1/4 cup. Weighing gives a more predictable dough than measuring these by volume.
- The sugarSugar appears in the ingredient list but is never mentioned again in the method. Add it to the dry ingredients with the corn meal and flour before the fats go in; otherwise the biscuits bake out savoury.
- Corn meal grindFarina gialla means simply yellow (corn) meal; the grind is not specified. Rolling to a quarter inch and cutting with stamps suggests a fine or medium meal rather than a coarse polenta grind, which would tend to crumble at the rolling stage.
- Why two loavesThe fats and egg will only bind part of the dry mixture; the remainder is brought together with water, and the two are combined at the end. The recipe's own reason for kneading only a little at that point is that the dough must remain soft.
- Water quantityNone is specified. Add it a tablespoon at a time to the leftover dry mixture until it just coheres — usually 3 to 5 tablespoons, depending on the meal.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Biscuits of this thickness suit a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges take colour but the tops stay pale.
- Egg glazeThe single egg goes into the dough, so beat a second egg, or an egg yolk with a splash of water, for brushing the tops before baking.
- Tin preparationGreasing with lard and dusting with flour works, but parchment is simpler and stops the sugar in the dough catching on the base.
- YieldThree to four dozen or more biscuits at 2 inches across, depending on the stamps used and how thin the dough is rolled.
Anise-scented biscuits built on yellow corn meal belong to a broad northern Italian family of everyday sweets — Veneto, Lombardy and the Piedmont all have versions, the best known being the Venetian zaleti (from gialletti, "little yellow ones"). Maize arrived in Italy in the sixteenth century and became the staple grain of the north long before it had any standing in the south, so corn meal turns up in Italian baking as a cheap extender and, later, as a texture prized in its own right: it gives a short, sandy crumb that wheat flour alone will not. Anise is often said to have been a common flavouring for such biscuits, and lard alongside butter was normal domestic practice, butter being the more expensive of the two. Books like this one, aimed at Italian-American households in the early twentieth century, carried these regional home-baking staples into English-language kitchens with the Italian name kept alongside the translation.