Who would have thought that it would be hard to make chocolate chip cookies in Italy? Not me. I knew I would have to do the conversions, but I thought that would be easy enough. The oven temp? How much is a teaspoon? The equivalent of one stick of butter? What is one stick of butter? 8 ounces? I thought I would find it all on the internet.
But, the shopping was the difficult part. I went to a grocery store in a little town at the base of the Prealpi mountains. It's a town big enough for the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, I thought. But no. No vanilla. No chips. No brown sugar. No baking soda. That's actually got a name like 'sodio bicarbonate' or something. You wouldn't think it would be a part of my chocolate chip cookies, but it is. It probably says that on the box in English right under 'baking soda', right? Well, I don't like the sound of it and I couldn't find it.
I decided I couldn't leave the store without buying something since I'd spent nearly 20 minutes wandering around it's three aisles looking for things. (This is actually the big grocery store in town.) So, I bought some Asiago cheese and a loaf of bread. Yes. A regular loaf of white bread with a few words on the package that I didn't understand. (I didn't have my dictionary.) In the end, the words were 'soft' and 'sliced'. Believe it or not, the soft, sliced pre-packaged white bread is better than the bread from un panificio. Is the new problem the fact that I have become so accustomed to my bread in Paris that nothing can compare? Is there no good Italian bread?
Back to the ingredients. Mamma mia! Brown sugar? They have brown sugar but it's crystals just like white sugar. The only way I could describe it to people in my search for these ingredients was that it was kind of like snow. Like if you wanted to you could make a little ball with it, no? Chocolate chips? I finally found them in a box. It doesn't seem right to use anything that doesn't come in a red and yellow bag. Vanilla? That took days to find. In the end, it comes packaged like the little samples of Ferragamo perfume I have in my top drawer. Two tiny little tubes in a little package like batteries. And.....it's white. By 'white' I mean 'clear'. But I have always called clear liquids white. When I was young and wanted a 7up in a restaurant I would ask for a white pop. Butter? Okay, they have butter in Italy, I know. But they don't have salted butter and instead of a box with four sticks it's like a big slab. It didn't seem like things were going to work out very well.
But, yesterday was the big day. I went to my friend Matteo's house to make them. He's 7 and adorable and deserves a whole blog post which I will write another day. For now I will stick with the cookies. I had some version or another of all the ingredients. I put them in the bowl, mixed them up, and did the usual little taste test. Unsatisfactory, but there was nothing I could do. Maybe the white vanilla doesn't taste the same? Certainly the butter lacking salt meant that I had to add more, but how much? Teenie, tiny little chocolate chips? These were not the cookies of The Cookie Lady, but it was the best that I could do. Into the oven they went (on parchment paper on a cookie sheet which I have never done, but I was too embarrassed to ask Matteo's mom if I could put the cookies directly on the sheet). The oven set at 190 instead of 375 didn't sit well with me, but that's what I googled. The usual 8 minutes and obsessively checking for the perfect doneness started at about 5 minutes. That leads me to believe the 190 to 375 thing couldn't have been right. So, I took them out and didn't have my usual brown paper to put them on which is often, in fact, a shopping bag sliced open which seems to be the perfect finale for my cookies.
But, I did the best that I could. And guess what? I have an invitation to go back to this house any time I want to make more cookies. So guess what? I'm going back tonight. This little town has it's own little version of Carnevale. It's an hour from Venice, which is celebrating Carnevale now (almost) but that seems to be something for tourists. I think what I will see tonight might be the real thing! I was in Venice last year for Carnevale and what I saw seemed to be Halloween. Maybe I missed something, but there were lots of people dressed up and walking around. That was it. Really. So, I think I can expect the same thing tonight in a sweeter, simpler version. It will be about the kids. They wear costumes and get candy. Matteo is going as a cowboy and he will be accompanied by La Donna dei Biscotti.
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