Cooking With Clara: Sicilian Fig Cookies II
September 14, 2009 by Heather R.
Filed under Recipes
On last week’s Great Depression Cooking with Clara video, 94-year-old Clara showed us the beginning of her Sicilian Fig Cookies, a treat she and her family enjoyed just after the Great Depression ended.
She and her granddaughters, for whom this is a yearly tradition, prepared all of the fruits and nuts before letting them sit overnight in the fridge.
Part two, above, picks up with Clara making the dough for the cookies. She measures out ten cups of flour and mixes it with a pound of lard before adding a cup and a half of sugar. She then adds one cup of cold milk, two tablespoons of baking powder, one tablespoon vanilla extract, and twelve beaten eggs before letting the whole thing rest for one hour. This is one gigantic batch of cookies!
The oven is preheated to 350 degrees while Clara works a little more flour into the sticky dough. I need to get one of those huge bowls — it would make quite a few things a lot easier to work with!
She then puts flour on the board and begins rolling out the cookies, using just a portion of dough at a time. She forms the fig mixture into a tube and place it on the dough and rolls it up together before using a fluted pastry cutter to section them off. She cuts each roll into shorter pieces and places them on a cookie sheet for baking. The cookies are baked for 8-10 minutes on the bottom rack before being moved to a top rack for five more minutes. She cools the cookies on a clean sheet laid over her bed (love it!) and then ices them.
Though it looks really time consuming and involves a lot of ingredients, I really want to give these a try this holiday season. Have you ever made Sicilian Fig Cookies? Was it worth it?
