This week we celebrate an ugly duckling dessert and more generally the way that many of the best tasting things at the market are blemished or misshapen. We all know that many fruits and vegetables have been bred for sturdiness, shelf life, and looks. The heirloom tomatoes or apples we are so excited to find at the market often announce themselves by their thin skins, cracked or seamed surfaces, bumps and bruises. For the heirloom seeker, what was once a consumer turnoff becomes the attraction. “Ah, that’s a fruit that has not been bred for looks,” we think, reaching for it. And more often than not, the heirloom delivers with its depth and complexity of flavor. The ugly duckling reveals itself to be a swan.
Among our favorite such fruits at the market are the comice pears from Ratzlaff farms. They don’t last long. When they first arrive, they are rough-skinned and lumpy and reasonably tasty—especially if left out on the counter for as much as a week. Each outing at the market they look a bit worse and taste a bit better. By now, they are mottled, plump, dripping with juice and bursting with flavor. Their skins manage to be both susceptible to nicks and bruises and gritty and a bit bitter. If we are feeling ambitious and persnickety, we peel the pears, letting the juice drip over the salad or yogurt they are about to grace. But we gobble them up with their skins as well, enjoying the contrast of silky and resistant, sweet and slightly bitter.
While the pears don’t need any embellishment, the Italian almond cookies called Brutti ma Buoni, or “uglies but goods” make the perfect partner. Pears and cookies share an appearance that belies their deliciousness (although we wouldn't really call either ugly), complementary flavors, and local availability. We draw our recipe from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Long ago we started toasting the almonds that went into the cookies, although Marcella does not. One of our mothers, a great baker and exacting teacher, insists that nuts used in baking (and most other cooking) should always be toasted first to deepen their flavor. She is even known to ask suspiciously “did you toast these nuts?” and, trust us, you never want the answer to be “no.” But for the market shopper it is possible to pump up the flavor of these cookies and appease dear Mama without any extra effort. How seldom that is the case. The trick is to use the deeply flavored Cabral Family farms dry roasted almonds. With their skins on and their interiors roasted a dark brown, these almonds magnify the flavor and improve the appearance and texture of the cookies. The result—a cookie with no flour or gluten and no dairy—is a wonderful keeper and a crowd pleaser. In a further tribute to Mom, we keep them in a tin box, as she did and as did her mother and aunts before her. She hated to part with a tin box, stockpiled the sturdy ones, and inspired her descendants to covet and hoard tin boxes as well. If you want to keep cookies crisp, the tin box has no rival.
Brutti ma Buoni or Piedmontese Almond Cookies
11 ounces of Cabral Family farms dry roasted almonds (Marcella calls for skinned, blanched almonds)
1 cup plus 3 tablespoons granulated sugar
4 egg whites (we use ones we’ve frozen from all that pasta making this summer)
Salt
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract (we must boast that we use an extract we made out of vanilla beans bought for a song at Vanilla, Saffron imports in San Francisco and soaked for months in vodka)
Butter for smearing the cookie sheets
Marcella says this makes 55-60 cookies but for us it’s more like 30.
1) Preheat the oven to 300 degrees
2) In a food processor, pulverize the almonds with the sugar or chop them very fine and combine with the sugar, or smash almonds and sugar in a mortar and pestle
3) Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks. This is very easily done in a standing mixer but can be done with a hand beater as well.
4) Fold the beaten egg whites into the almond and sugar mixture and add the vanilla extract.
5) Smear two baking sheets with butter. Scoop up about 1 tablespoon of the batter for each cookie. This is a great time to use a small cookie scoop if you have one. Otherwise you need to use two spoons, one to scoop up the batter and the other to push it off onto the pan. Keep the mounds of batter at least 1 inch apart as these cookies spread out. As Marcella explains, “don’t worry if they seem shapeless: Their Italian name means ugly, but good; they are expected to be very irregular.”
6) Bake on the middle racks of the oven for about 30 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through. Spread them out on a cooling rack. When they are completely cooled, store them in a tin biscuit box.
Marcella expressly recommends the tin box, but we were way ahead of her.
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