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Italian Christmas cookies come to the table as the final course and summation of the most important Italian American annual ritual, the Christmas Eve Fish Dinner, called by some, the Feast of the Seven Fishes. The eager delight in Christmas cookies rivals the taste for Italian Easter cheese pies. While Christmas cookies and Easter pies hold tight competition in gustatory pleasure, Italian Christmas cookies overwhelm sight as well as taste. When you enter the dining room for Christmas Eve fish dinner, your eyes move immediately to the sparkling sweet pyramidal mound on the sideboard. The Christmas cookies, some enrobed in in white glaze and rainbow colored sprinkles, reign enthroned on a silver platter or on a three tiered server. Almond confetti, pastel colored cannellini and small squares of torrone decorate the sides of the tray.The tray’s collection of shapes and colors and textures dazzle the eyes and seduce the tongue in the most wonderfully joyous and ostentatious baroque expression of the Italian American excessive imagination.
Italian Christmas cookies in my childhood family presented a singular curiosity.The Italian Christmas cookies were not really Italian. My Italian Christmas cookies are the product of other than Italian hands: the hands of my mother. My mother is of Irish descent. While of third generation Irish, my mother absorbed, mastered and surpassed no small number of Italian American recipes. My mother’s Irish Italian Christmas cookies left the Christmas cookies of my Italian heritage aunts somewhere in the realm of Keebler and Nabisco.One of my earliest kitchen memories recall her leaning over tray after tray of cookies, dressing them with sprinkles or setting down those tooth breaking silver sugar balls.I can still see the mounds of sesame cookies, sugar powdered pecan balls, white iced lemon cookies, black and white pinwheels, sugar cookies, spritz cookies, sand tarts, oatmeal and chocolate chip.
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Cookie tin AntiquesNavigator.com `
My mother would bake so many cookies that she stored them in several super large pretzel and potato chip cans. No one touched those cans. Italian Christmas cookies made their appearance only after the Christmas Eve Fish Dinner as dessert.
(As a side note: when researching the pretzel and potato chip tins, they all came from companies in Pennsylvania.) There was only one exception to opening the Christmas tins.From her dozens of cookies my mother would reserve a certain selection of each kind. These segregated cookies were destined to be sent to my mother’s sisters who, at the time, were stationed overseas.My mother would mail away two good sized batches to her distant family in Turkey and Hawaii. The remaining cookies were left untouched until Christmas Eve.But that was many years ago.
Now in her eighties my Irish American mother still turns out the finest cookies I have ever experienced. My assessment is not merely a son’s devotion. My mother’s cookies would stand against any of the finest gourmet creations. She still makes a variety and quality of Christmas cookies that has no equal and that I cannot recreate. My mother insists that electric mixers ruin cookies. She beats the batter by hand with her wooden spoon. The cookies I have listed here are but a few of the many varieties I grew up with.
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Italian Christmas Cookies
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