My Grandmother's Favorite Cookie Recipe Has A Truly Ancient History

It turns out the "S" cookie or "biscotto esse", a staple of my Sicilian-American childhood, has a much deeper and more fascinating history than I anticipated. Plus two recipes!

When I was a kid visiting my nannu and nanna, there was one food that was always, always on hand. In a special place on the kitchen counter sat a big jar of what we called “biscotti” or “S cookies”. These weren’t the biscotti you get at coffee shops or most Italian bakeries, these were simple, once-baked, S-shaped cookies with a bit of cinnamon sugar on top. These cookies were the all-purpose snack: we ate them with milk or coffee after school, we would serve them with fruit after dinner, and my grandfather would break them up and put them in a bowl with coffee-milk (like cereal) for his breakfast. S cookies were always on hand- as long as there were biscotti in the jar you knew you wouldn’t go hungry (I jokingly called them “Sicilian hardtack”).

My “S cookies” (biscotti esse), from a recipe handed down to me from my grandmother.

When my nanna (who churned out S cookies on the weekly) passed away, I yearned for the cookies of my childhood. I tried to find them available commercially, but it was tough going. Italian cookie company Stella d’Oro makes a similar S-shaped cookie (they call them “breakfast treats”) but they aren’t the same. Italian bakeries rarely offer S cookies in their cookie selections, since S cookies are too basic and are outshone by more spectacular creations: the double baked, nut-studded biscotti, the Italian flag cookies, and the rest of the rainbow of the Italian cookie assortment. S cookies are basic, old-fashioned, and boring. Sicilian hardtack. I taught myself how to make them from a stained recipe card written by my mother, who learned to make them from my grandmother- and I make them for my own children. But where did these cookies come from? And why were they such a feature of my grandparents’ household, but not in all Italian households? A few years ago, I decided to find out, and the story took me way way deeper than I anticipated.

In Italy, these cookies are called biscotti esse (“esse” is “S”), susamielli, or biscotti squisiti (“exquisite cookies”- probably a play on how “squisiti” begins with an “S”). And they are said to be a specialty of the province of Ragusa, Sicily, which is exactly where my grandmother’s family came from. Makes sense! In that part of Sicily, people eat these cookies in much the same way we did in my Sicilian-American childhood- as a casual snack, good with coffee or breakfast. They are sometimes topped with sugar and cinnamon, sometimes with a bit of sesame, but always lightly sweet and understated.

But one day, I encountered another cookie that challenged my narrative- I saw a cookie assortment including my beloved S cookies, but these cookies weren’t Sicilian- they were Greek. The cookie is called koulourakia, and as it turns out, it is a Greek treat most commonly associated with Easter. Koulourakia recipes are pretty much identical to biscotti esse recipes, and the cookies share the same S shape. Except not only S shapes- koulourakia come in a variety of twists, including a curly S shaped one. But these are not named after a letter of the alphabet: the Greek alphabet doesn’t have the S in it, it has the Greek letter sigma which has a different shape (Σ). These cookies are said to be in the shape of snakes.

Sesame-topped Greek koulourakia. CC 2.0 by Glane 23

Now, the potential Greek origin of the S cookie wasn’t surprising to me- Southeast Sicily is known as “Greek Sicily” since it was culturally dominated and occupied by Greeks for a long, long time (Ragusa was itself an ancient Greek colony). So it makes sense that my beloved Sicilian S cookie might have Greek roots like so many Sicilian foods do. But the idea that they were snake shaped, not S shaped, was a surprise. And it gets even more surprising- serpentine Greek koulourakia are said by many on the internet to originate from the super-ancient Minoan civilization of Crete, which existed from roughly 3000 BC to 1500 BC. Even Wikipedia says so (though the citation is pretty weak).Could it be that the mundane cookie of my childhood has a five thousand year history? I had to find out, so I spent a few months researching.

Greece, Southern Italy, Sicily, and Crete- an area dominated by Greek culture in antiquity. Ragusa, in Southern Sicily, is seen as the home of the biscotti esse or “S cookie”. The Minoans lived on the island of Crete.

Culinary history can be pretty challenging. Today, we write our recipes on cards, in cookbooks, and the internet, but in ancient societies literacy was rare, and most spent little time writing about food. And if we’re trying to trace a food to Minoan civilization it’s even harder- the pre-literate society had some scripts and hieroglyphs, but they remain undeciphered and unreadable. So most of what we know about ancient food comes from archeological evidence- which is scant- and artistic depictions of food. What we have learned about the Minoan diet comes strictly from analyzing ancient refuse (seeds, bones, and ashes), many discoveries of clay pots, and a few images. Try as I might, I could not find anything in the literature to support the idea that the Minoans made a snake-shaped biscuit. They do appear to have made baked foods, including cakes of some sort. And there are many artistic depictions of snakes (presumed to be religious, including famous statues of “snake goddesses”), but no serpent-shaped cookies. Except there is one, tantalizing clue.

A Minoan figure of a woman presumed to be a “snake goddess”, 1300-1200 BC. Photo CC 4.0 by Zde

Before I go on, I want to be clear on the word “cake”. Though today we say “cake” to mean a certain specific sweet, soft, fluffy dessert, the word did not always mean that. “Cake” was once used in English to describe anything molded or baked- from large to small, sweet or not, from a variety of ingredients. The ancient Greeks had dozens of words that got translated into English as “cake”, including the small “cakes” that we would now call “cookies”, “pastries”, or “breads”. So from here on, I will using “cakes” in this very generic way.

One of the uses of small, handmade “cakes” in the ancient world was to eat, of course, but another was as an offering. Ceremonial cakes were used by the ancients along with other food sacrifices, to please gods or as a part of rituals. And there is one Minoan archeological find that is of interest to us: it is from the site named Haga Triada, where a spectacular sarcophagus was found, dating to around 1350 BC. The sarcophagus is brilliantly painted on all sides with a fresco of a funeral procession. Most of the figures are bearing offerings of sacrifice: animals including a bull and goats, a bull’s horns, jugs of wine (or blood), and one image of a dish of what is thought to be small cakes. These cakes are round, not S shaped, however. But look at the curlicue decorations elsewhere on the sarcophagus- they resemble exactly the shape of koulourakia. Is this the origin of the supposition that the Minoans invented snake-shaped cakes?

The Hagia Triada Sarcophagus (1330-1370 BC), top:front middle:back, bottom: an illustration of a woman and a bowl of funerary cakes (left) and the S-shaped symbol that decorates the sarcophagus (right). photo CC 2.0 by Jebulon

All of this is kind of a stretch. I myself think the popular idea that koulourakia come to us straight from the super-ancient Minoans is pretty implausible- at least we don’t have the evidence to support it. We know so little about Minoan foods that we can’t even name any specific dishes- not to mention snake-shaped cookies. But expand the view to the later civilization of classical Greece (which starts in about 800 BC) and the story gets better.

The use of ceremonial cakes in ancient Greece was very common and incredibly widespread. Small, sweet cakes were often eaten, but they were also used as offerings at sacred temples, for funerals, and in private rituals at home. One of the most common ritual “cakes” was called called melotoessa, usually translated as “honey-cake”. No recipes for these cakes exist, but descriptions suggest it was made of flour, honey, oil, and sometimes yeast. And, they definitely suggest these “cakes” were hard like a cookie or biscuit, not tender like modern cake. Ancient Greeks used melotoessa frequently as offerings, and they made special baskets called likna to hold them at temples. These baskets of offering cakes piled up so high sometimes they needed to be thrown out frequently. Honey-cakes would often be made in animal shapes according to the deity they were offered to: deer-shaped honey-cakes called elaphos were offered to Artemis (deer were associated with the goddess), and bull-shaped honey-cakes called pelanoi were offered to Zeus.

Greek terracotta figure of a woman making cakes, ca. 500 BC. photo CC 2.0 by Marsyas

At this point, I should take a detour to discuss the ancient Greek concept of the oikouros ophis, which literally means “house-protecting snake”. Like many Mediterranean cultures, the ancient Greeks had a fascination with snakes, who were thought to be immortal (since they shed their skins and seem to rekindle their bodies). Snakes were seen as powerful and positive, not scary and dangerous as we think of them now. The oikouros ophis was a supernatural snake who would protect a house or building, so long as it was kept happy through regular offerings of honey-cakes. These serpents protected homes, of course, but they also protected temples: a giant oikouros serpent was thought to reside in the Erechtheion temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens, and hundreds of honey-cakes were brought to it by ancient Athenians to keep it happy.

Households would pay homage to their own house-guarding snakes in a variety of ways, including decorating pies and breads with snake images. Making honey-cakes in the shape of snakes was an obvious extension of this practice, either for offering to a sacred temple snake, your own house-snake, or just for snacks. And it turns out, many descendants of the ancient Greek snake-shaped cake exist: from the snake-shaped torciglione cake of Umbira to the taralli dolci cookie of Puglia to the coiled tyropita strifti of Greece. But the most direct descendant of the ancient Greek house-guarding snake-shaped honey-cake seems to be the Greek koulourakia and the Sicilian biscotti esse. Though today bakers use different flour, different fat, and different sweetener, the spirit of the cookie remains remarkably the same: making a home more welcoming through cookie-making. Though my grandmother didn’t like snakes much, she was doing what perhaps hundreds of generations of Mediterranean women did before her- protecting her home and her family by making small, sweet, magical cakes. And she made them in the form that she had been taught, carrying on an ancient serpentine meaning without even knowing it.

I gained a new respect for S cookies while doing this work, and for my grandmother too. She fulfilled her role as a torch-bearer for a tradition that went back thousands of years. The least I can do is make S cookies for my own children, which I do anyway- they love them for breakfast. But I do it now with a clearer sense of history and meaning. That’s what food history does for me, and I’m grateful.

* * *

Of course, I couldn’t finish this piece until I tried to make snake-shaped cakes in the ancient Greek way. So, after a few days of research, I put together this recipe:

Oikourous Ophis Honey-Cakes, inspired by Ancient Greek Descriptions

The ancient Greeks used wheat, barley, or spelt flour along with honey and olive oil to make honey-cakes. I improvised this recipe using whole-wheat flour, since at this time they would have milled flour with the bran intact. The result is more delicious than expected- the floral character of the honey and oil come through!

combine:

1 cup whole-wheat flour (the ancient Greeks used flour with bran, similar to our whole-wheat flour).

1/2 cup honey (I used a beautiful wildflower honey)

1/4 cup olive oil

just enough water to bring the dough together, about 2 tablespoons

Mix all the ingredients together, making a stiff dough. It will be sticky. Use oiled hands to roll into snakes and curl into coils.

Bake in a 375 degree oven about 10 minutes.

My Oikourous Ophis honey-cakes, in the style of the ancient Greeks.

And, I feel obliged to include my family recipe for

Sicilian S Cookies

Ingredients:

Mix dry ingredients together well, set aside. Using a mixer, combine softened butter, eggs, vanilla, and lemon zest. Add flour and mix until well combined. Dough will be soft and sticky. Wrap in plastic wrap or wax paper and refrigerate at least 30 minutes.

When the dough is firm, turn out on a floured cutting board and flatten with a rolling pin to create a roughly 12 inch by 4 inch rectangle, about 3/4 inch thick. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Cut into 12 sticks about 1 inch wide, twisting into “S” shapes. Bake in a 375 degree oven 10-12 minutes or until lightly browned.

variations: dough can be flavored with anise extract, lemon extract, almond extract, or just vanilla if desired. Cookies can be topped with rainbow sprinkles or sesame seeds (in the latter case they can be called “biscotti regina” and formed into ovals instead of S shapes). They can also be iced with a simple powdered sugar icing after baking and cooling.

notes: this basic dough is called pasta frolla in Sicilian and can be used for a wide variety of cookies, pastries, and crusts.

My frugal depression-era grandmother generally used margarine to make these cookies, and many in my family swear by margarine, shortening, or a butter-margarine mix for S cookies. I like butter, myself.

Postscript: I’ve discovered snake-shaped cookie recipes from Cyprus, Armenia, Croatia and even Mexico! (apparently brought by Italian immigrants). Do you have S cookies in your repertoire? I’d love to hear about them!