A couple of days ago, my friend Alice Rohman came over for lunch, and I wanted to make something sweet to go with tea and coffee after the meal. After the whoopie-pie debacle, my mind turned toward anise-flavored biscotti, a recipe I received from another friend, Mary Wysong-Haeri, who was a neighbor of mine in the 1990s. Mary often made this biscotti when she had me over for tea, and I was just wild about it. Luckily, Mary gave me the recipe before she moved to Oregon, and it seems that she got it from an Italian woman.

The biscotti came out exactly the way it should. After discussing a variety of subjects—going to college in Maine; the writer and economist Paul Krugman, recently profiled in the New Yorker; how we schedule time for writing (me) and painting (her)—we praised the virtues of biscotti. They are not too sweet and not too fatty—my recipe uses one cup of sugar and a half-cup of butter for twenty-five or so decent-sized cookies. Yet, they are sweet enough to be satisfying. They are easy to bake. And, they keep a long time. There is a lot to like about biscotti.

Of course, there is biscotti, and there is biscotti. I’ve had some biscotti, admittedly commercially made, that were little more than sweet crunch, and a hard crunch at that. The recipe that Mary gave me is very flavorful. It calls for 1 ounce of anise seed as well as 1 ounce of anise extract. I love the licorice taste of anise. In fact, I love the taste of black licorice, the stronger, the better. But Alice, who is not at all keen on black licorice, also likes the flavor of anise, and we both concluded that although there is a similarity between the two, black licorice must be flavored with something different. (I will be looking into this.)

I like the anise-flavored biscotti so much that this is what I make when I make biscotti. However, I have decided that the time has come to branch out. A quick look on the Internet confirmed my hunch that most biscotti is relatively low in sugar and fat. I thought, why not make a habit of keeping some on hand most of the time? After dinner, with a cup of tea, a biscotti or two would be the perfect finish. On the Internet, I found a recipe for roasted pistachio biscotti, and that is what I’ll be trying next. I’ve also been thinking of fiddling with the recipe that Mary gave me, and substitute lemon extract for the anise extract and poppy seed for the anise seed. A bit of grated lemon peel might be good to add as well.

Anise-flavored Biscotti

½ cup of butter (melted)
1 cup of sugar
4 or 5 eggs, depending on size, slightly beaten
1 ½ cups of walnuts
4 cups of flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
¼ teaspoon of salt
1 ounce of anise seed
1 ounce of anise extract

Preheat over to 350 ° F. Combine dry ingredients. Add extract, eggs, and butter. Mix. (Dough will be stiff.) Form two loaves—like French bread— and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Make diagonal slices every ½ inch or so. (Mine are more like an inch.) Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until firm but not completely baked. Remove from oven and slice through all the way. Turn pieces on side and bake 5 minutes. Flip the pieces and bake another 5 minutes or until golden brown. (Depending on how moist the dough is when it starts out—and this depends on the size of the eggs—the cookies might need to be baked 10 minutes on each side. When they are nicely browned and crisp, they are done.) After the biscotti has cooled, store in an airtight container. They will keep for at least a week, and maybe longer.