Italian Cookies & Friendship via Richmond, Indiana

My dear friend, and fellow Midwesterner, Joanna reached out to me a few weeks ago with a stash of Italian cookie recipes from her grandmother Lucy & her grandmother’s friend, Philimena (who went by Minnie, but with such a doozy of name like that, I needed to give the whole version a walk in the park.)

Brown pieces of paper, starting to wilt with age, covered with beautiful penmanship that nearly reads like a foreign language — aahhh yes, that’s the stuff I love to see. Handwritten recipes older than me!! Ladies writing recipes for Other Ladies! Yes yes yes!

“This one screams, FIGURE IT OUT.” Joanna said, regarding the sparse directions and questionable quantities on the recipe labeled “Taralla” – which also features one of my favorite recipe ingredients:

“anise, or whatever.”

I was fresh out of whatever, so we opted for anise.

Check out the recipes for Tadals and Italian Thumbprint Cookies.

Welcome to Richmond, Indiana

Joanna’s grandma was named Lucy Moore, maiden name Consolino. Lucy’s parents came over from Italy at the end of the 19th century. Her father came over first and found a job woking on the railroad, and started to build his family and new life in the Midwest. Lucy was born in 1919 and raised in the thriving Italian-American community in Richmond, Indiana.

“It’s a boring place. You don’t want to go there.” Joanna promised.

Well, I don’t have the budget to travel to the hometowns of my heroines, but here is a list of things I found out about Richmond, Indiana from surfing the great world wide web.

And y’know, it doesn’t sound like such a boring place (sorry for being needlessly obstinate, Joanna. Just trying to do your grandmother’s hometown justice, since I guess I have my hat in that ring now.)

The Ladies of Richmond

Joanna has heard lots of stories of Lucy cavorting around with the Ladies Clubs of Richmond, which sounds like something I wish still existed.

The hot gossip surrounding the Ladies Club came from Joanna’s mother, who remembers how the ladies would travel around with purses (which they called “pocket books”) and would stuff the insides with whatever free things they could find. Creamers, sandwiches, a patent for the Phantoscope – if you leave it laying around, the Ladies of Richmond are coming for it.

Lucy passed away from breast cancer when Joanna was 2, so she doesn’t have personal memories of her – but she has lots of stories. Lucy’s lifelong friend Minnie has always been a part of Joanna’s life, and stepped into the role of being grandma after Lucy’s passing.

Minnie and her husband, Basil (it gets better – his nickname was Bae) would regularly have Joanna’s family over for dinner. Joanna remembers these dinners as huge affairs inside Minnie’s very cool house of black & white checked floors, and olive green carpet. Minnie was quite the cook, and her huge meals would often have many courses. The rule was always “finish whatever she gives you!” So Joanna remembers clearing plate after plate of Italian-American cooking, happy about it, but very stuffed.

One of Minnie’s powers was to manifest cake. She had a kitchen in her basement, which Joanna suspects existed to provide Minnie with a cooler cooking environment during the muggy Indiana summers. If Joanna’s family would ever swing by unannounced, Minnie wouldn’t miss a beat: she’d head down to the basement kitchen momentarily, and quickly return, cake in hand, ready to serve. Magical cake cupboard?

Tadals vs. Taralla

Unfortunately, we had a mystery to solve first. The recipe was labeled was taralla, but Joanna remembered always calling them tadals.

Her other recipe was for Thumbprint Cookies, which I had made and seen before plenty of times, so I wasn’t too concerned. Though filling thumbprint cookies with pink icing was a new one for me – and I highly recommend.

Unfortunately for this baby food historian, it turned out that taralla and tadals weren’t just two pronunciations of the same cookie, but two separate cookies that looked very different from each other and were made using entirely different methods. Her recipe was just a list of ingredients and no instructions, so I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at.

I searched a few blogs, recipe books, and bothered my boss and asked a friend to Skype a chef she worked with in Italy. Here’s what I was able to discover:

Taralla are a cookie that appear to have many regional variations. Like tons. Some are sweet, some are savory, but the common link appears to be a circular, bagel-like shape. Some are even boiled before baking, likening them even closer to bagels. But they are usually quite dry, and dunked in coffee or wine (YES! Wine cookies!) when eaten. They’re often made around Easter. And RECENTLY, I found a tiny mutation of these on a Fred Meyer meat & cheese platter! I shrieked with delight, as my friends all said “what are those weird looking bagel-y things.”

Tadals closely resemble a frosted sugar cookie, with a hint of anise flavor. The texture is quite different from a sugar cookie, however. They bake up more like small cakes, soft and tender fresh out of the oven, but satisfying to eat a day or two later with coffee. They’re a delight to frost and decorate.

Italians really have dialed in their stale-cookie game. Make a huge batch of tadals & Italian thumbprint cookies, and let them sit around a few days – you’ll still be happy.

I eventually made the assumption that her recipe labeled taralla actually created tadals, and took that leap. It checked out with how Joanna remembered the cookies, so we went for it.

Cookies & Friendship

Making cookies with a good friend was a perfect way to spend a day. We were a little apprehensive since we had sketchy directions, and relied a lot on Joanna’s childhood memories for reference points, but the end results were delicious. Sketchy directions and faded memories are often enough of a road map.

We sat back and cheers’d to cookies & friendship, via Richmond, IN. I liked to imagine Lucy and Minnie were also hanging out at the same time, making sure we didn’t screw up their cookies.

Check out the recipes for Tadals and Italian Thumbprint Cookies.