Another recruiting lunch at another neighborhood Italian today. The restaurant shall go nameless here, because I'm only interested in one item on their menu: "cantucci e vin santo." When I went to Florence for the first time a year ago, I ended almost every meal there with the classic Tuscan dessert of cantuccini con vin santo. And I have to quibble with this restaurant's interpretation of one of my favorite after-meal indulgences.

Vin santo - or "holy wine" - is a magnificent dessert wine made in the chianti region of Italy. Like most great dessert wines, it gets its sweetness from a beneficial mold known as the "noble rot," which dries and shrivels wine grapes on the vine, concentrating their sugar content so that the wine they yield is sweet and robust, if limited in quantity (it's said that a single glass of Chateau d'Yquem, the world's most famous Sauternes, requires an entire vine's worth of grapes). The best vin santos I've tried combine the honeyed sweetness of Sauternes with the heady aromas of sweet sherry and the warm, full body of tawny port. In short, it's like having all my favorite sweet spirits in a single glass.

The classic accompaniment for vin santo are the little almond cookies from Prato known as cantuccini. Cantuccini are literally "little cantucci," and cantucci are variations on the classic but often underappreciated Italian cookies, biscotti. The word "biscotti" means twice-cooked, a reference to the two-step baking process that leaves the cookies dry and hard. Cantucci and cantuccini, being loaded with egg yolks, are so hard when dry that you could crack your teeth on them. This makes them a perfect vehicle for the vin santo, with which they enjoy a symbiotic relationship. The cookies are dipped into the vin santo (traditionally served in a small tumbler rather than a stemware glass), which softens them and infuses them with its unique perfume and the warmth of its alcohol. When the cookies are gone, a few crumbs settled at the bottom of the glass lend a gentle almond note to the remaining wine, which can be sipped like any other digestif.

So what's my beef with the "cantucci e vin santo" I had today? I have no quarrel with the vin santo; even mediocre vin santo is still a rare pleasure. No, I'm more concerned with the cookies that were being passed off for cantucci. Half of the cookies were beige, Starbucksesque biscotti, the other half were butter cookies with pine nuts - not biscotti at all, and certainly not cantucci. I've played around with a few recipes I found on the Internet - in English, Italian, and German - and amalgamated them into one that I prefer for making my own cantuccini. Kept in an airtight container, they keep for weeks or even months (there being little to no water in them, there is no medium for harmful organisms to grow in). In a pinch, however, I've been known to pick up a bag of cantuccini from one of my favorite specialty markets; the brand that tastes most authentic to me comes in a white mylar bag with a picture of the cookies on the front and red cursive lettering reading "cantuccini" above the picture.

Recipe: Cantuccini

Ingredients:
500g all-purpose white flour
400g granulated sugar
250g whole, peeled almonds
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp amaretto
1/4 tsp salt
small pinch saffron

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, combine 2 of the eggs and all of the egg yolks with the vanilla, amaretto, salt, and saffron, and beat thoroughly. Add 350g of the sugar and whisk until fully incorporated. Sift together flour and baking powder, and add in stages to mixing bowl, stirring to incorporate until you have a sticky but firm dough. Stir in the almonds until evenly distributed in the dough. Set aside to rest.

Line a baking sheet with a Silpat or greased parchment paper. Divide the dough into two portions, and form each into a baguette-shaped loaf three to four inches wide on the baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until outside is hard and beginning to brown. Meanwhile, beat the remaining egg with a few drops of water. Remove the loaves from the oven, brush them with the egg wash and sprinkle them with the remaining sugar. Cut them into diagonal slices about 3/4 inch thick, space them out on the baking sheet, and return the sheet to the oven for 10 more minutes or until completely dry and golden brown at the edges. Cool completely on a rack before storing in an airtight container.

Alternative flavorings for the cantuccini include cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, and citrus zest, but I find that amarreto and saffron remind me most of the cookies I had in Florence. If you don't have a scale to measure the dry ingredients, you should (a) get a scale for measuring ingredients for baking, since it's the only way to be accurate, or (b) approximate using standard volume-to-weight conversion ratios.