Biscotti Regina

These are the cookies that sit in glass jars on the counters of every pasticceria in Palermo. Biscotti Regina, the queen's biscuits, though which queen they honor depends on who tells the story. What matters is the cookie itself: a tender, lightly sweet dough encased in a crust of toasted sesame seeds that shatter when you bite.

The sesame is not decoration. It is the point. Sicily sat at the crossroads of Mediterranean trade for centuries, and the Arab merchants who ruled the island from the ninth to eleventh centuries left behind more than mosques and irrigation systems. They left sesame, almonds, citrus, and a taste for sweets that still defines Sicilian baking.

These cookies require no special skill, only attention. The dough must not be overworked. The butter must stay cold. The sesame must coat every surface. Sicilian grandmothers made these by the hundreds for feast days and weddings, stacking them in towering pyramids. You will make three dozen. That should be enough, unless you taste one while they are still warm from the oven. Then you may need to make more.