Pignoli Cookies

Walk into any Italian bakery in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or South Philadelphia and you'll find these cookies arranged in neat rows behind the glass. Pignoli cookies arrived with Sicilian immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, and they've been a fixture of Italian-American holiday tables ever since. The recipe couldn't be simpler: almond paste, sugar, egg whites, pine nuts. Four ingredients. No flour at all. The result is a cookie that tastes like concentrated almond essence, chewy in the center with a delicate crackled crust.

The quality of your almond paste determines everything here. This is not marzipan, which contains more sugar and less almond. True almond paste runs about fifty percent almonds by weight, and you can taste the difference immediately. Odense and Solo are reliable supermarket brands. If you have access to an Italian specialty grocer, their house-made paste will be superior still.

These cookies demand pine nuts on the exterior, pressed into the dough before baking so they toast golden in the oven's heat. Yes, pine nuts are expensive. There is no substitute that delivers the same buttery richness. Consider this: the recipe makes two dozen cookies from a single seven-ounce tube of almond paste. The investment per cookie is modest when you do the arithmetic.

I've watched home bakers overcomplicate these for years, adding flour or ground almonds or extra egg. Resist the urge. The original formula works because of what it leaves out. Trust the simplicity.