Paste di Meliga

I recently had the Occasion to spend a long weekend in Asti in the Piedmont area of northern Italy. Of course, the first thing I did was to take a walk and look at all the pastry shops. There was one cookie in all of them: a delicately flavored but coarse-textured piped butter cookie with delicious tastes of cornmeal and vanilla. I came home and experimented with duplicating them. This recipe is the result.