Bis! Bis! Bis!

My mother made the mistake of taking my teenage sister, two brothers and me to an afternoon concert at a popular theater in Rome, where we had moved in the mid-’60s. I can’t remember what the orchestra played, but it must have been good. When the music stopped, the audience jumped to its feet shouting “Bis! Bis! Bis!” I, too, shouted “bis,” without knowing what it meant. I was the youngest of four and suspended somewhere between California kid English and Roman kid Italian. On the way home one of us asked what we’d been yelling.

“Encore,” she said, dodging Fiat 500s and Vespas as she herded us, her American kids, around fountains and columns on our way home. “Bis is for music and opera when you want to say encore. “Bis is for biscotti,” said one of my brothers as we squeezed into our building’s ancient elevator. “Biscotti, biscotti,” we chanted and clapped. My mother shook her head, then relented. From the fridge she pulled a dishcloth enfolding a ball of buttery dough left over from yesterday’s crostata. Crostata was our favorite jam tart--a thick, crusty shortbread platform smeared with sour cherry preserves.

“Wash your hands,” she said. “Instead of playing with clay today you’re going to make crostata biscotti.” She put my sister to work grating the zest off a lemon, and ordered me to shell and crush almonds. My brothers went out for oranges. These my mother peeled, cooking the peels with sugar and water until they glistened. We took turns around a big mixing bowl, squeezing the lemon zest, crushed almonds and candied orange peel into the cold dough. After pinching off a walnut-sized ball of dough, my mother rolled it into a perfect round cookie. “You make the rest.” My sister drifted to the window, peering down at the nattily dressed young men and their motor scooters, while my brothers and I transformed the dough into snakes, dragons, hearts and Vespas. The cookies had barely cooled before we’d gobbled them.

Years later I learned the origin of biscotti. For centuries, Italians baked bread rounds, cooled them and then baked them again to eliminate humidity. No damp meant there was no mold, and that, in turn, meant the twice-cooked biscuits would last forever. Sea biscuits had long been the staple of miserable long-haul mariners. A clever baker added butter and sugar to them and, bingo, sweet biscotti were born.

Nowadays crostata biscotti are whipped up for their own merits. Romans fashion them into fanciful shapes, including, I suppose, hearts and Vespas. At some point I gave up on those shapes, and snakes and dragons, too. But I still can’t help playing with silky biscotti dough, forming it into the initials of dinner guests, for instance, a disarming surprise guaranteed to elicit childlike smiles from St. Peter’s to San Pedro.

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Biscotti di crostata

Makes about 2 dozen biscotti

1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter, chilled

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 egg yolks

1/2 cup slivered almonds

zest of 1 organic lemon, minced

2 heaping tablespoons diced candied orange peel

(candied lemon peel may be substituted if orange is unavailable)

Cut butter into small pieces. Pour flour into a mound in a large mixing bowl and make a well in the center with your fingers. Add the butter, sugar, eggs yolks, almonds, lemon zest and candied orange peel. Stir gently until thoroughly mixed, 2-3 minutes. Pinch and squeeze the dough, pushing away and gathering it back until it cleans the sides of the bowl and has the consistency of modeling clay, 5-7 minutes. Roll the dough into a compact ball, put it in a clean bowl covered with a dishcloth and chill for one hour. Grease two 10 1/2-by-15 1/2- inch cookie trays. Put chilled dough on generously floured work surface and pinch it into pecan-sized balls. Roll them out with your palm or a rolling pin to flatten them into cookies about 3-4 inches long, 1-inch wide and 1/4 inch thick. Use a knife or small spatula to straighten the sides of the cookies. Transfer the cookies to the trays with a spatula and bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes until golden brown and firm. Cookies will get crisper as they cool.

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David Downie latest book is “Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome” (HarperCollins).