Would you like a cookie or… a biscuit?

I love cookies but I had never tried to cook them before yesterday.

Americans are crazy about cookies. In the kitchen specialty stores you can find huge boxes of cutter cookie sets with a great variety of shapes. In most of English-speaking countries outside North America the most common word for cookie is biscuit (biscotto in Italian).

I read that their origins date to the 7th century when they appeared for the first time in Persia, shortly after the use of sugar became common in the region.

But there is a difference with the Italian biscuits. In my opinion, the American ones contain too much butter. They are good but very very heavy. If you eat one cookie you are already full. In Italy we love them in a kind of religious way. It means that having biscuits for breakfast is like having teatime in England in the afternoon. The traditional Italian breakfast is simply biscuits, croissants, fette biscottate (a cookie-like hard bread/rusk often eaten with butter and jam) or cereals. We dip biscuits in our cappuccino, caffè latte (hot coffee with milk), tea or milk. Well, they are good as snack too but not if you’re dieting…

And NO… we don’t eat omelets, eggs or bacon for breakfast. For Italians it’s unthinkable.

Last Friday one of my dearest friends, Mariella, gave me an Italian cookies recipe she found on the Internet. Actually, I was planning to cook croissants but I changed my mind, and I tried to cook cookies for my very first time yesterday… and you know what? They were sooo good. Yes, “were”… My colleagues really loved them and one of them said that they were very good even without dipping them.

I’m very proud of myself.

You’ll find the recipe in my next post. Try them and you won’t regret it!