Pine Nuts Are For Cookies

Italian bakeries usually have amaretto, biscotti, macaroons, red cherry and other delicious looking cookies calling to me  — Take me home! Eat me! Then my eye comes across the pignolis, or pine nut cookies. I usually stop and stare at them because I love pine nuts on salads, pizza and of course, in pesto. I have eagerly bought a pignoli cookie, excited to taste the mix of nuttiness and sweet, but time and again, the bakery version of a pignoli is dried out and crumbly. I can barely taste the pine nut.

Then my pastry teacher, Sam, introduced me to this recipe for pignolis. I was astounded how delicious, chewy and addictive homemade versions of this American Italian cookie could be.

First, I was curious about the history of the cookie. There doesn’t seem to be any wonderful stories associated with pignolis, but pine nuts have been around for eons. Humans living in Europe and Asia started adding the seeds of pine trees to meat, fish and vegetables in the Stone Age, says Wickpedia. In Roman and Greek times, they were stored in honey, turning them into a dessert. The Romans also thought pine nuts were a kind of aphrodisiac, according to Janet Fletcher, who wrote a history of pine nuts for Epicurean.com.

In Italy, pine nuts are known as pinoli and in cookie form are called “biscotti ai pinoli.” Pignoli, is the American word for the cookie. My Italian-American friends tell me they  most associate the cookie with Christmas, but I think you should make and eat them any time you want.

Making pignoli cookies is incredibly easy. It only requires four ingredients. Almond paste, granulated sugar, egg white and pine nuts. When looking around at other pignoli recipes on the web, I saw all kinds of additional ingredients that aren’t necessary — like powdered sugar, orange zest and flour. Stick to just these four ingredients.

In case you haven’t bought almond paste before, you can find it in the baking section of the grocery store. Before careful not to get marzipan which has a similar look.