A recipe for special memories

Jamie Herzlich of East Northport writes a weekly business column for Newsday.

After growing up in a traditional Sicilian family, most of my early childhood memories revolve around food.

My grandfather grinding the meat to make his own brand of sausage - the likes of which I've never tasted again. My grandmother frying up Crisco to make the sphingi (zeppoles) and an array of delicacies that I can no longer pronounce.

So when I got a call that my aunt Isabel Licata was dying, it's no wonder that my thoughts gravitated toward food. Most of the memories I had of my aunt came from her kitchen. Memories of her meticulously rolling out dough to carefully press together the most wonderful spinach raviolis I've ever tasted. There were braccioles bursting with egg, salami and pignoli nuts as well as wonderful cured olives that took months to make.

Until my aunt ended up in rehab this past summer after a stroke, my mother and I would visit her at home in North Babylon. With her age and ailing health, her creations had been limited to a few items - homemade pizzas and assorted cookies she knew were our favorites.

Several months before that, when I sensed her health was failing, it dawned on me that after losing a host of family members in the past two decades - including all four grandparents and my father - I never once had asked any of them for a single recipe.

I wouldn't let that happen this time.

So I asked aunt Isabel for an Italian cookie recipe that had always been my childhood favorite - a cross between a biscotti and a Stella D'oro breakfast treat, but with powdered sugar and chopped walnuts. I carefully wrote it down and put it away.

When her health grew progressively worse and she was no longer able to open her eyes or speak, I went to see her one last time. I was sad that she could no longer talk to me and that her house would never again be filled with the warm and familiar smells I had known as a child.

Knowing it would probably be the last time I would see her again, I went home and took out the cookie recipe. As I measured and rolled the dough, I imagined how she had done this time and again for us, of course not needing the guidance of a handwritten recipe.

She died two days after I visited her.

When I told my 51/2-year-old son that she died, he said, "You'll always have her cookies, Mommy."

He was right. And maybe someday his children and their children will too, because this time I remembered to ask.

Aunt Isabel's Powdered Italian Cookie Recipe

Two sticks of margarine or butter, semi-softened

3/4 cup sugar

2 cups flour

a pinch salt

2 tablespoons vanilla

2 cups finely chopped walnuts

Powdered sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 325.

Beat margarine and sugar together until well mixed.

Add flour, salt, vanilla and walnuts and mix (preferably with an electric mixer).

Roll into golf-ball-size balls and shape into half moons.

Place individually on parchment paper on ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake 20-25 minutes. Do not brown.

Remove from oven and allow to harden.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Makes about two dozen.