Esse di Raveo

The biscuit was created in Raveo, a tiny village in the Carnic mountains of the province of Udine, by the baker Emilio Bonanni; the family that still makes them dates the recipe to about 1920, though other accounts place it in the 1920s or as late as 1930. Working in his bread bakery, Bonanni began turning out, alongside the loaves, a crumbly biscuit of the plainest ingredients, twisting each one by hand into an S, a shape chosen, by all accounts, simply because it was pleasant and quick to form. Demand outgrew the bakery, and in 1976 his heir Aldo built a workshop given over to the biscuit alone. Copied by other bakeries across the mountain Friuli, it became a sweet claimed by the whole region.

A dry, delicate snap that shatters into fine, sandy crumbs on the tongue, sweet but not cloying, with a clean butter-and-vanilla warmth and no aftertaste, light enough that one is never quite enough.

The lightness comes from two choices. First, the leavening is ammonium bicarbonate (hartshorn), which on heating breaks down entirely into carbon dioxide, ammonia and water vapour, leaving no residual salt behind; the gases blow the thin dough open into a dry, brittle honeycomb, and because the biscuits are slim the ammonia bakes off completely, leaving no smell. Second, the butter is kept low, barely a tenth of the dough, so there is little fat to soften the crumb or make it spread; the biscuit stays pale, crisp and sandy rather than rich and chewy. Sugar and egg set into a glassy, low-moisture structure that snaps cleanly and keeps for weeks.