Orange-Almond Coins

Though one rarely thinks of butter in a Chinese context, shortbreads, pastries, and sugar cookies made with or fried in butter were an “exotic” luxury item on Chinese tables as early as the ninth century, when the cosmopolitan Chinese of the Tang dynasty were also toasting one another with grape wines and cooling off with sorbets made from mare’s milk and fruit juices.

• I like to think that the quintessential luxury almond cookie resembled these buttery c