Posted on by Elizabeth Evershed

Amaretti

My friend Katka appeared on the doorstep early in Advent with a tub of homemade cookies and these rather impressive looking gift biscuits. I saw the tin and thought you might like it for your biscuit blog she texted me with a winking emoji 😉 and she was right. The makers of this particular brand, Amaretti Virginia, have been baking biscuits since the 1860s and are now a household name in Italy and all over the world. Virginia are famous for their soft Amaretti, ‘morbidi’ in Italian, although they also make the crunchier, drier ‘secchi’ too. Both types of classic Amaretti are included in this selection along with Baci di Dama and mini Cantucci.

I’ve always thought of Amaretti as sweet coffee or dessert biscuits so it was a surprise to find that the name means ‘little bitter things’ and derives from amaro, the Italian word for bitter. This is apparently because of the bitter almonds or apricot kernels originally used as a base but if you sampled them without knowing what the name means you’d never guess. The sugar and almond content is so high the soft Amaretti in particular taste like marzipan which gives them a distinctly Christmassy vibe.

I certainly appreciated the Amaretti travelling to North Yorkshire this Thursday when the train service was subject to cancellations and delays as a result of Storm Pia. After a number of unplanned dramas at Kings Cross (including managing to lose one bag of presents in the crowded station for twenty minutes before recovering it), I eventually arrived in Leeds on a jam-packed service three hours later than planned and without a cup of tea or anything substantial in the way of lunch. But I can honestly say that I spent the journey contentedly, listening to Jonathan Ogden’s music and nibbling on the Amaretti I had stowed away in my hand luggage. Here they are arranged to best advantage on one of the Christmas napkins I’d also brought with me (morbidi on the left and crunchier secchi to the right).

One of my happiest memories of 2023 was making a retreat to a remote part of South Wales, what the old Celtic Christians would have called a thin place due to the amount of prayer that’s gone up here. I went looking for God in the stillness and found him in conversations with various people who crossed my path in the course of the week. One particular chat I keep coming back to was with a lovely Christian father from the Antipodes visiting with his family. Unbeknown to him, he was offering a masterclass in how to deal with disruptions and re-routings. I had heard that their car had developed serious problems on the journey to the retreat place which had left them all stranded in the middle of nowhere for several hours but when he talked about the experience he was full of thankfulness to God for having got them safely to their destination in spite of all the difficulties. “We didn’t even think to pray,” he told me, “but at every point we needed it help just… appeared. We were looked after every step of the way.”

Carningli (Mound of Angels), Pembrokeshire

He kept returning again and again to this theme of the goodness of God as the bedrock of the universe, not denying the pain that is also part of the human experience but focusing on the one who comes to bring us life in all its fullness – the God who is not the author of evil and is always working to bless, heal, encourage and restore. I knew this in my head, of course, but hearing this young Australian father speak so warmly about that goodness made me wonder how much I had allowed that knowledge to permeate my heart.

“Give thanks to the Lord for he is good
His love endures forever…”

Psalm 136

The Psalms are full of declarations of God’s goodness. Not only because it is true but because keeping this fact continually before us actually helps us perceive more of that goodness. I got the chance to practice looking for it in the minuscule and very first world challenges of this week: to see it in the kindness of the station staff, the good humour of fellow passengers, the recovery of my lost luggage and the provision of a seat despite the train being so crowded, in the texts from concerned family and friends who remembered that I was travelling, and of course the Amaretti in my bag… Like the sweet tasting biscuits originally made from bitter ingredients, it’s all a question of where you put your focus.

It also helps to remember that God is not only the ultimate source of all the goodness we see in the world, there’s also so much good he wants to do in it through us. And there are those who need to see God’s goodness at work in this world especially this year. As the season of goodwill, Christmas provides plenty of opportunities for making others’ lives brighter and better, whether giving time or money where it’s most needed or literally or metaphorically drawing together around a warm fire.

Illustration from a Book of Hours, Latin Belgium c. 1500-1550.

Wherever and however you are spending Christmas this year, I hope your Christmas is a good one. And whatever joys and challenges come your way in 2024, may you know the goodness of God in greater measure.

Further Delectation

Want to have a go at making your own soft Amaretti? I’ve not tried it but Gino D’Acampo’s recipe looks fairly easy.

Angela Ward’s podcast, A Beautiful Thing. Angela has been doing an Advent series on women in the genealogy of Jesus which is well worth a listen.

Finally, a bit of Yorkshire-style Christmas cheer from the wonderful Kate Rusby:


If you would like to see more entries more regularly and help keep this bestiary free of ads, you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar. 

Posted on by Elizabeth Evershed

Jacoba’s Biscuits

Sometime in the early autumn of 1226, a young noblewoman named Jacoba de Settesoli had a strange prompting to bake some almond biscuits for a friend of hers, the ‘poor little man’ (il poverello) and monk from Umbria who had often stayed at her house when he was in Rome. At the same time as she was setting out on the long journey to his friary, he was in the act of sending for her to say he was gravely ill — was dying, in fact — and would she come and visit him, bringing some of those sweet almond biscuits he liked?

Detail from Francisco de Zurbaran’s St Francis in Meditation

It made me smile to think that as he drew close to the end of his life, the man known to future generations as St Francis of Assisi felt the need of such a friend and such a biscuit. And I had no clue biscuits featured so memorably in the biography of Francis until a few weeks ago, when I got to visit a landmark exhibition on him at the National Gallery. From facsimiles of Francis’s own letters to Antony Gormley’s untitled sculpture conveying a moving openness and vulnerability, we were lucky to have a perfect guide in Angelo, a secular Franciscan and art historian. “I try to listen for the Holy Spirit while I’m doing the tour,” he confided in me as we were leaving the gallery, which seemed like a good explanation for his sudden mention of Jacoba’s biscuits…

Image from the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, which some believe is Jacoba due to the Seven Suns in her halo.

Jacoba would have been in her mid-thirties when Francis died. We know she had a family but was a young widow when Francis met her. His affectionate name for her was Brother Jacoba and he encouraged her to work out her vocation within secular life rather than joining holy orders. Sadly, the original recipe for Jacoba’s biscuits has not been preserved, but a variety of almond confections are made for St Francis’s Feast Day in the saint’s honour. This one from a modern Franciscan monastery seemed a good one to try but it’s fair to say it didn’t turn out exactly as I had envisaged. The first round soon spread out enough to fill their entire baking tray in the oven, creating what I could only describe as a cookie pizza…

I tried a second tray with smaller dollops placed further apart but the result was much the same. It’s the first time I’ve cut biscuits with a pizza wheel but they certainly tasted amazing fresh from the oven. What they lacked in shapeliness they more than made up for in tastiness however, as the generous amounts of chopped almond and half spoon of its essence brought out the almond flavour. Perhaps because I added a little extra vegetable oil, it was also pleasantly chewy. A sort of cross between a cookie and a Florentine.

For the moral, I got to thinking of that extraordinary paradox at the heart of the order that Francis founded expressed by Christ in the gospels when he says: whoever gives up his life for my sake will find it. Few people have given up so much or so gladly as Francis himself: in giving away his wealth to marry Lady Poverty and loving the misfits, outcasts and lepers of society, he came to identify less with the upwardly mobile goals of his merchant-class peers and more with the joys and pains of his divine master.

Untitled (“To Francis”) by Antony Gormley

The story of Francis as a young man divesting himself of his luxury clothes and handing them back to his astonished father is well known but in a challenge which feels topical for our own day Angelo stressed Francis’s readiness to divest himself of his natural opinions, shrugging off the weary tribalism of labels or factions that could hinder him from seeing the worth in others and relating to them in a spirit of openness and friendship. This took him into some unlikely friendships from the outlaw of Gubbio to the Sultan of Egypt, again in the footsteps of his divine master who ate with characters shunned by most of the religious leaders of his day and shocked his disciples by talking theology with a Samaritan woman.

Reflecting on Francis’s life in the visual journey of the exhibition certainly challenged me to live more simply and more generously. Sometimes that will call us to a place of radical alms-giving and sometimes a place of radical self-giving (or both in the story of Jacoba). This can feel costly at times but there’s also a freedom in it, a whisper that in the end the loss will be turned to gain in the upside down Kingdom of God. I don’t fully understand it myself, but all I know is, like the biscuits that expanded to fill every inch of the tray, the more space we give to God in our lives, the more he can fill it.

Detail from Giovanni Costa’s Brother Francis and Brother Sun (c. 1880)
Further Delectation

More on the St Francis Exhibition in London and a touching reflection on Jacoba’s story.

A beautiful interpretation of Francis’s Canticle of the Sun (in English translation) by artist Tony Wright:

If you enjoyed this bestiary article and have donated or are considering donating to this project, I invite you to give to a charity of your choice instead this month in the spirit of St Francis. The Franciscans International, Leprosy Mission, and animal welfare charities (quick shoutout here for Hedgehog Cabin) all spring to mind as causes dear to Francis’s heart, or you may have your own charity you wish to give to.

Posted on by Elizabeth Evershed

Baci del Chiostro

Lady’s Fingers, Roman Glasses, Bones of the Dead… Is it me or are the names of continental biscuits typically more imaginative than British ones? True, there are fewer opportunities for humorous misunderstanding as a result but also less sense of a back story, hints of a colourful history, in something as prosaically descriptive as a Custard Cream. This month’s biscuit translates to ‘Kisses of the Cloister’. At least that is the literal meaning of these Baci del Chiostro given to me by my friend Katka, a regional version of the better known Baci di Dama (Ladies’ Kisses) from Piedmont – popular little sandwich biscuits found in different forms across Italy.

Wrapped up like a sweetie in their bright orange wrappers, the biscuits are not as soft as I was expecting but would likely mellow a bit soaked in coffee if it’s not too much of a travesty to suggest that. You can definitely taste the chocolate-hazelnut filling and the little information I can find about them online suggest they came by their name because they look like two mouths kissing but I’ll leave you to judge that for yourself in the picture below! Recipes for Baci di Dama are easy to find but so far as I can tell there is only one company that makes this Baci del Chiostro version in Saronno.

For the moral, I got to thinking about the theme of kissing in scripture… From Judas’s famous kiss of betrayal to the ecstatic kisses of the lovers in the Song of Songs, there are a lot of moments in the bible where a kiss is used to communicate more than words: to seal a romance or a friendship or even a sacred moment of worship, as in the beautiful image of the woman who covers Jesus’s feet with kisses and perfume. “Greet one another with a holy kiss” Paul tells the Church in Corinth – an injunction that was taken rather too enthusiastically by one man at a fellowship I once belonged to – and a custom which lives on today as the Kiss of Peace usually given before the Creed in the Orthodox Church, and the slightly awkward handshake in the Church of England.

Psalm 85: Righteousness and Peace kiss each other (detail from the 9th century Stuttgart Psalter)

But it’s another kiss that stands out more for me in one of the best known stories Jesus told about one — or rather two — lost sons:

There was a man who had two sons. The younger son said to him, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them. After a few days, the younger son got everything together and journeyed to a distant country, where he squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent all he had, a severe famine swept through that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed the pigs. He longed to fill his belly with the pods the pigs were eating, but no one would give him a thing. Finally he came to his senses and said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have plenty of food? But here I am, starving to death! I will get up and go back to my father and say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”  So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still in the distance, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him…

Luke 15: 11-20

It’s generally called the Story of the Prodigal Son but as Henri Nouwen reminds us it is also the Story of the Compassionate Father. In the culture of Jesus’s day, the son’s demand for his share of the estate and behaviour after leaving home shows an exceptionally callous rejection of his family of origin. It’s only when he finds himself in need and sees his folly for what it is that he returns to beg his father’s charity, expecting to be let back in in disgrace and offering to return to the household to work as a servant. But his father sees him coming from a distance and offers no word of reproach; instead he runs to him and kisses him. He’s just so grateful to have his son back whatever he’s done, all he wants to do is celebrate with a welcome home party! (Much to the disgust of the performance-driven elder son.)

The Prodigal Son by Charlie Mackesy

As with the other parables the longer you sit with the story, the more you may find it has to say to you. (I love this particular depiction of the kiss by artist Charlie Mackesy.) Advent is the Church’s great season of waiting, but the older I get I wonder if it isn’t also about God waiting for us. Not to mark us down or trip us up or ask us what we were thinking of staying out so late, but like the father watching at the window for the first glimpse of his son returning, hitching up his robes and running forward to kiss him.

Further Delectation

Have a go at making your own Baci di Dama (or cloister?) with this recipe from BBC Good Food.

Looking for some quiet reflection over Advent? Henri Nouwen’s meditations in The Return of the Prodigal Son are well worth a read, inspired by his encounter with Rembrandt’s painting of the same theme. You can read Part 2 of the story, about the Older Son, here.

For those who haven’t come across it, I recommend the beautifully and carefully curated content at the Visual Commentary of Scripture – stunning art work and thoughtful commentary on particular passages. This Drop Down Ye Heavens triptych works as an Advent meditation.

If you would like to keep this bestiary free from ads and see more entries more regularly you are welcome to contribute to the Biscuit Jar.