A little while ago I told you about the cookbooks my grandmother gave me, old, tattered, and much-loved volumes that used to belong to my great-grandmother before her. One of them is called Mes Recettes pour votre dessert, and it contains 710 recipes for sweet things, arranged in alphabetical order from Amandés de Liège to Visitandines. And on page 222, this precious book offers a recipe for petits beurres.

Le petit beurre is a crisp little thing, not too sweet and not too rich, that melts on your tongue and takes kindly to a brief dunking in a cup of hot chocolate.

Le Petit Beurre (literally “little butter”) is a small rectangular cookie that was invented in 1886 by Louis Lefèvre-Utile, founder of the LU company in Nantes: he was the first to create a cookie manufacture in France, and was very much ahead of his time in terms of marketing and advertisement too.

This cookie, also called Petit LU, quickly became a classic, and although it is now 120 years old it is as sprightly as ever, with millions of packages sold every year throughout the world. The fascinating story of the petit beurre would really warrant a whole book — I wouldn’t be surprised if one had already been written — but you can read a little more about it here (in French). [Note: the LU brand now belongs to the Danone group.]

Le petit beurre is a crisp little thing, not too sweet and not too rich, that melts on your tongue and takes very kindly to a brief dunking in a cup of hot chocolate. Its signature silhouette has scalloped edges, tiny holes on the surface as if pricked by a needle, and a small browned ear at each corner.

Some advocate that the corners are the best, and a close member of my family was once admonished for having gone through a whole package, eating exclusively les petites oreilles, and returning the rest neatly into the paper wrapper. This same family member also had an interesting experience with a tiny chestnut that fit exactly inside her left nostril, but I will keep that story for another time. [Update: The close family member tells me that she calls the corners “thumbs”, not “ears”, because they look like a baby’s toes.]

Because petits beurres are so readily available from French stores — even the tiniest ones — they don’t seem to be the type of cookie that one makes at home, and I had never seen a recipe anywhere before. To my knowledge, the special mold that gives the petit beurre its shape is not for sale, so I chose to make mine with the puzzle cookie cutter that I bought from Muji recently. Whichever shape you pick for yours, make sure it is one that has dents and corners (a star would work well too) so that you get the maximum amount of crisp angles.

The recipe was charming (I’ve copied it below for your enjoyment), very easy to follow, and the resulting cookies were wonderful: although no one would mistake them for the original petits beurres in a blind test, there was a clear similarity of flavor.

Less dry than the packaged version, my petits beurres were crisp and crumbly like good sablés should be, with just the right dose of sweetness, a clean, lingering taste of fresh butter and crème fraîche, and a delightful hint of salt. Perfect for an afternoon snack, they were also much enjoyed with sliced strawberries (especially Mara des Bois from the market) or a rhubarb compote.

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I am very pleased to announce that as of yesterday, 9:07 pm, the manuscript of my book has officially left my hands, landing just a few seconds later on my editor’s desk, 3,635 miles away. The moment I hit “send”, my heart thumping audibly, I drew a deep breath, climbed down from the bar stool on which I was sitting, and walked to the fridge to retrieve the bottle of pink champagne that had been chilled for the occasion. A pop, a toast, a sip, a kiss — I believe there may have been a few giggles on my part, too, and perhaps a little happy dance.

Once enough champagne had been consumed to duly mark the event and the hunger pangs became more and more difficult to ignore, we walked out into the pouring rain to have dinner at Casa Olympe, which, in passing, I warmly recommend. What better way to celebrate than with a scampi broth followed by crispy veal sweetbreads, especially when Jean-Paul Gaultier happens to be sitting across the tiny room from you?

Of course, I am now anxiously awaiting the comments and edits on the manuscript, but today is a beautiful day, I feel like I’m on vacation, and I intend to spend the afternoon — the next week even — basking in the sunlight of the terrace across the street.

And for those of you who may be wondering, the book is scheduled for US publication on May 1, 2007.

(Casa Olympe – 48 rue Saint-Georges – 75009 Paris – 01 42 85 26 01)

Chose promise, chose due*, here is my take on absorption pasta, or risotto-style pasta. The idea of this technique is to coat the pasta with a little olive oil, add just enough liquids to cover, and cook until desired tenderness. According to Virka — who read it in the Italian paper La Reppublica so it simply must be true — this cooking technique dates back from the early 13th century, and was in fact the only one that was used before it was displaced by the now-classic boiling method.

For this first trial, I used the ricciole pasta that came in my package of Italian goodies, and followed Pascale’s instructions as a guide. I didn’t have stock on hand — I am a bad, bad person — so I just used filtered water: the flavor was fine, but will of course be richer if you use homemade stock, you Martha Stewart you. The pasta was cooked with thin sticks of zucchini (cut with my mighty mandoline — no fingers were sliced in the process, I’m getting better at this), and received a sprinkle of crushed cacao nibs and crispy flecks of aged Parmesan just before serving.

The crispy flecks of Parmesan are a fortuitous by-product of my recent attempt to make Parmesan wafers with the previously featured hunk of 3-year-old Parmigiano Reggiano. It turns out that this Parmesan is marvellous, yes, but much too dry and much too proud to let itself be turned into a vulgar wafer: the grated cheese didn’t so much melt as grill, and my golden circles just crumbled into bits when I tried to lift them from the baking sheet. Said bits were delicious however, so they were promptly recycled into sandwich garnishes and canapé toppings.

Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, the absorption pasta. So, how was it? It was lovely, that’s how it was — so lovely in fact, that I might stick to that technique from here on in. First of all, and however odd this may sound, I hate bringing pots of water to a boil — it is the most boring thing in the world. Since I am an impatient cook, I cannot help but lift the lid every ten seconds and, as we all know, watched water never boils, which is kind of a problem, especially when you’re hungry and thus cranky.

Secondly, the absorption method makes it easier to test the pasta for doneness: when you pluck one from the pan, you can taste it (almost) straight away, since it isn’t as scorching hot as when you lift it from a pot of boiling water. And once you have reached the consistency that you like, the pasta can go straight from the pan into your plate, without continuing to cook as it does when you have to drain it and toss it with the sauce. Finally, and more to the point, this technique allows a delectable coating of starch to develop around the pasta, giving it a toothsome, silky texture.

As the pasta softly simmered, I was quite surprised to notice that a scent of almonds wafted up from the sauté pan: I am not entirely sure whether that came from my olive oil, from the pasta itself, or a happy alchemy between the two, but I had never had that happen before. This scent had somewhat subsided by the time the pasta was cooked, but it was still a lingering presence in the finished dish, and went delightfully well with the softened zucchini, the toasty flecks of Parmesan, and the earthy crunchy cacao nibs**.

* Chose promise, chose due means “a promise is a debt.”
** Cacao nibs (éclats de fève de cacao in French) are tiny bits of rosted cacao beans, not sweetened or processed any further. They have an intense chocolate scent, and they are crunchy and nutty.

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Earlier this year, I received an email from an Italian blogger named Massimo, who announced to me that C&Z had been voted Best Non-Italian Food Blog in the awards he’d been hosting on his website, Peperosso* — I’m sure that having an Italian word in the name of my blog helped. And since Massimo puts his mangoes where his mouth is (Lost, season 2:episode 17), there was a prize for each of the winners, and the prize was a 100€ gift certificate from San Lorenzo, an online store that specializes in Italian goods, and ships them in Europe.

You probably all receive those fake “You’ve won the lottery!” emails by the dozen (please tell me I’m not the only one), but this was a bona fide offer (no credit card information was requested) and I was delighted: it’s nice to discover you’ve won something, it’s even nicer when you didn’t even know you were in the running for it, and when the something you’ve won is edible, well, there’s no price tag on that.

Because I am me, it took me a couple of months to log on to the website and make my order. But when I finally did, it felt like writing a list to a foreign-exchange Santa: armed with my Italian-French dictionary (the website is available in other languages now, but wasn’t at the time), I spent quite a while browsing the virtual aisles and agonizing over what to get. It turns out my dictionary isn’t very food-savvy, but I got by, and learned lots of new words that were promptly forgotten the next day. And when I received the package — a rather huge box that I went to collect from my guardienne‘s office — here’s what was inside:

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