A Borrowed Bowl Goes Back Full

The storm came in before dawn and stayed all day — thunder first, and then rain that didn’t so much stop as keep changing its mind about how hard to fall. I had a small plan for the morning, a walk and a couple of errands, and I let it go without much regret. Some days the weather makes the decision for you, and you’d only be arguing with thunder. Instead I lit the oven, which is the one thing that makes a wet day pleasant, and made taralli.

The reason for the baking was a bowl. The neighbour lent it to me back at the end of September, and it has been sitting on my shelf empty ever since, which is a slightly embarrassing way to keep a favour. So I made a batch and sent the bowl back across the road with the first handful inside, still warm. The rain caught me on the three steps to her door. Worth it.

Taralli have one trick that surprises people: you boil them before you bake them. The little rings go into salted water for a minute or so and come up floating, and only then into the oven, which is what gives them their snap — crisp the whole way through, no soft middle. It’s the same idea as a bagel, a different flavour, and that brief boil is the difference between a biscuit that keeps for a month and one that goes soft by the evening.

While they cooled I was hunting for a command I knew I’d typed a dozen times and couldn’t rebuild from memory. Ctrl-R in the terminal searches your command history as you type, so three letters brought it back whole. I lean on it constantly and forget it exists about as often, which is a fair description of memory in general.

The house smells of fennel and warm flour and the rain is still going. The bowl is in someone else’s kitchen now, and I have a tin of taralli for the week.

Recipe: Taralli

Ingredients

• 500 g plain flour (tipo 00)
• 150 ml olive oil
• 200 ml dry white wine (or warm water)
• 10 g fine salt
• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
• ½ teaspoon cracked black pepper (optional)

Preparation

1. Mix the flour, salt, fennel, and pepper in a bowl. Add the oil and the wine and knead for about 10 minutes, until you have a smooth, firm dough. Cover and let it rest 30 minutes.
2. Divide the dough into small pieces of about 15 g. Roll each into a thin rope roughly 10 cm long, then bring the ends together and pinch to form a ring.
3. Bring a wide pan of salted water to a gentle boil and cook the rings in batches. They are ready when they float to the surface, about a minute. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and drain on a clean cloth.
4. Heat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Arrange the drained rings on a lined baking tray and bake 25–30 minutes, until deep golden and dry-sounding when tapped.
5. Cool completely, then keep in a sealed tin — they last several weeks.