Zuccherini Montanari

These are the cookies of the montanari, the mountain people who lived in the high passes between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. They are not elegant. They are not refined. They are the cookies that sustained families through long winters when the snow closed the roads and the pantry held only what had been stored in autumn.

The anise here is not subtle. It announces itself, as mountain food must. The glaze, called ghiaccia in Italian, forms a shell that cracks when you bite through it. This is not a flaw. This is the point. The contrast between the hard, sweet exterior and the tender crumb beneath is what makes these cookies memorable.

Zuccherini means 'little sugared things,' and montanari tells you exactly who made them and where. Village women shaped these rings for feast days, for weddings, for the moments when ordinary bread would not do. They keep for weeks in a tin, which mattered when you lived hours from the nearest town.