Culture

blessed biscotti
By Patricia Majher | Photography by Philip Shipert

Bake a batch of the sweet treat even St. Francis let himself enjoy

What do a modern-day professor from Canada and a 13th-century saint from Italy have in common? The answer, improbably enough, is a cookbook, called Cooking with the Saints: An Illustrated Treasury of Authentic Recipes Old and Modern.

Ernst Schuegraf, a professor of computer science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, loves his vocation. But he also loves his avocation, which is cooking. While
glancing through cookbooks one day, he noticed two recipes that mentioned the names of saints and decided to
see if he could find more that had connections to holy people.

When he’d compiled more than a hundred such recipes, he gave a literary
agent a call and sold his idea for a Catholic cookbook honoring the feast days
of significant saints. And Cooking with the Saints was born.

The book, published in 2000 by Ignatius Press, contains 170 recipes for main
courses, side dishes, soups, snacks, breads, and desserts. More than 70
different saints, from Agnes to Wilfrid, are honored within its pages, which also
include biographical sketches and famous portraits of each.

In St. Francis of Assisi’s biography, Schuegraf notes that, “Francis insisted
that all brethren should live in simplicity and poverty and entirely from alms.”
Though a man of simple means, the Italian saint did allow himself the luxury
of biscotti, a twice-baked sweetened bread. Says Schuegraf: “It is supposedly
one of the few foods that St. Francis let himself really enjoy.” Tradition has it
that St. Clare prepared it for him.

The search for an authentic biscotti recipe led Schuegraf to Wilma Reiva
LaSasso’s 1958 title, The All Italian Cookbook (second edition, Regional Italian Cooking), published by The Macmillan Company. We reprint LaSasso’s recipe here with the kind permission of her estate.

Paletta di Mandorla (Almond Slices)
Yield: 50 slices
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
4 eggs
4 cups flour
2 cups almonds, whole, finely
chopped or 4 cups almonds,
ground
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream butter, sugar, and eggs.
Add the other ingredients and
knead until smooth. Form two
oval-shaped rolls, about 1- inch thick.

Bake in the oven at 375* for 10 to 12 minutes until golden
brown.When cool, cut into slices 3/4 of an inch thick and toast in
the oven for 3 minutes.

Got a really sweet tooth? You can add additional flavor to the biscotti – and
emphasize the connection to St. Francis – by dipping half of each treat into
dark chocolate and drizzling white chocolate on top to create the appearance of a Franciscan sandal.

Double-Chocolate Coating
Yield: Enough to coat 36 biscotti
6 ounces high-quality bittersweet
chocolate
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 ounces white chocolate

Melt the bittersweet chocolate
and butter in a microwave,
stirring every 15 seconds until
nearly melted. Then, remove
and stir until fully melted. Dip
half of each biscotti in
chocolate, and then let dry on a
cooking rack. Melt white
chocolate in a microwave – see directions above – and place in a
plastic freezer bag with a tiny piece of the corner cut off. Drizzle
white chocolate in a crisscross pattern over the bittersweet
chocolate, simulating the appearance of a sandal.

A Cache of
Catholic Cookbooks

If Cooking with the Saints appeals to you, you might want to check out these
other Catholic-oriented cookbooks as well:

• A Continual Feast: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Joys of Family and Faith
  Throughout the Christian Year by Evelyn Birge Vitz, published by Ignatius
  Press.
• From a Monastery Kitchen, Twelve Months of Monastery Soups, Simplicity
  from a Monastery Kitchen: A Complete Menu Cookbook for All Occasions and other titles by Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette, published by Liguori
  Publications.
• From Saint Hildegard’s Kitchen: Foods of Health, Foods of Joy by Jany
  Fournier Rosset, published by Liguori Publications.
• Breaking Bread with Father Dominic, Breaking Bread with Father Dominic 2, More Breaking Bread, and Bake and Be Blessed: Bread Baking as a Metaphor for Spiritual Growth by Fr. Dominic Garramone, published by Blue Sky Distribution.

Originally Published: November 2003