Baking Biscotti

It is one of my all-time favorite jokes: 

An elderly Italian man lay dying in his bed. He had only a day or two of life left. But as he contemplated his inevitable demise he was overcome by a magnificent aroma wafting up into his bedroom from the kitchen below. It was the smell of biscotti being baked by his wife of 55 years. Tears streamed down the dying man’s face as he thought If only I could eat one more cookie—I will die a happy man. And so he musters up all his strength and crawls out of bed—then crawls down the stairs---then across the kitchen floor. But just as his hand reaches up to grab a warm biscotti cooling on a baking rack on the kitchen table, his wife of 55 years slaps him on the hand  and says—They are not for you!—they are for the people at your funeral!

And that joke is what came to mind shortly after discovering my great Aunt Zia Giangrasso’s biscotti recipe. I thought about the toil of preparing six pounds of biscotti dough and the time and precision required to evenly bake hundreds upon hundreds of  1 x 3 inch perfectly twisted cookies in an oven with only one rack and without the luxury of a Kitchen Aid food processor equipped with a dough hook or a prepatory kitchen with infinite counter space.

I thought I can barely stand the effort and mess of opening a solitary package of Nestle’s Toll House Chocolate Chip break and bake cookies and arranging 1 x 1 inch squares of prepared dough  on Teflon pans placed in my convection oven which houses 3 cookie sheets at once.

It occurred to me that baking in my great Aunt’s times was a dedicated all-day event—which also was completely labor intensive.

I thought if I was the woman in the joke I would not have merely slapped the dying man’s hand—I would have beaten him unconscious with the weighty wooden rolling pin while saying I have to do all this work just for you!!.

Because for as much as we complain about how hard it is to juggle a career and a household and how we never have enough down time because we are too busy and our lives are too complicated, it pales to the laborious lives of our grandmothers’ generation.

Those women really worked hard.

And their achievements (for the most part) went totally unrewarded and   unrecognized—unless you were fortunate enough to be Betty Crocker.