New Years Eve: My grandparents, Lidia and Fred Selkregg, left, dance at their annual New Year's Eve party in the basement of their Nunaka Valley house in the early hours of 1962.

As the city slid into its darkest days over the last few weeks, I got a craving for something I haven't had since the holidays of my childhood: biscotti. Buttery, thin and warmed with anise, they always appeared around this time of year, carrying a flavor brought from Italy, the mysterious country my Nonna left behind when she came to America, the bride of a G.I. after the war.

These biscotti were a New Year's party food, and my grandparents were New Year's party people. They arrived in Alaska just before statehood and for three decades hosted an epic annual bash in Nunaka Valley, in their wood-paneled basement with the orange shag carpet and the built-in bar.

Everybody used to turn out in those days: the neighbors, politicians (the year Sen. Mike Gravel showed up, there was a line of people who wanted to yell at him), wayward Italians, professors who worked with my grandmother at the university, insurance adjusters who worked with my grandfather. There was clam dip and Everclear in the punch (people got so drunk, at least according to family lore, they ended up sleeping over, passed out on the dance floor). There was mistletoe and jazz records and a net full of balloons stapled on the ceiling that came down on the crowd at midnight. And up in the kitchen, next to the plug-in percolator, there was always a plate of thin, golden biscotti.

Or at least that's how it's been told to me. I was very young when they had their last party, but I still like New Year's best. It has symbolism I can get behind. Out with the old, in with the new. The light is coming back, the darkness subsiding. You lay old problems to rest. A new year stretches out before you unmarred, full of plot lines yet to unfold.

Looking back, I wonder if that's why my grandmother liked it, too. She left Italy after seeing her schoolmates and neighbors die in bombings that tore up Florence. She burned the journals she wrote in those years, about the loss of her first boyfriend, a soldier killed in the Alps, about the nights spent smoking and knitting behind the black-out curtain, listening to German soldiers in the street. It was a pivot point. A grand new year. Darkness receded, adventure began. She crossed the ocean with her new husband, a woman wiped clean, leaving even her language behind.

It was decades before she returned, and even then she only visited, never planning to stay. Her stories for us about her childhood and the war always came in fuzzy, harsh details softened and endings made sweet. She died 10 years ago, before I could ask her about all the things she left out.

A few weeks ago, in my own kitchen, my head filled with a clear image of her under the yellow light over the stove, beating egg and the sugar into a smooth cream, her silver bracelets clanking. I knew what came next. Batter went into the loaf pan. Then she'd bake the cakes. Then she'd slice them and then toast them in the oven. How was it I'd forgotten?

I inherited her wooden recipe box, with "Gold Medal Flour Home Service Recipes" printed in gold on the front. I hauled it down and went through it. Nonna wasn't a notable cook, but she had a few signature dishes. Garlic-studded roast beef cooked on the stove top; salty, rosemary chicken cut along the backbone and roasted flat; Italian-style minestrone put through a food mill; cream puffs filled with pudding.

Her recipe box was stuffed with folded up recipes from the Anchorage Times, clipped out neatly, too clean to have been tried. "Yogurt Fruit Whip." "Molded Cheese Dessert." "Creamy Shrimp Casserole." The biscotti recipe, I imagined, was written in her slanty Nonna script, in Italian, spotted from years of use, the road-map for the New Year's taste of my origin, possibly even carried over from the old country. Swarthy relatives I didn't know were probably eating them right now.

I pulled out every piece of paper in the box. There was no such recipe.

So I called my mom. She knew exactly where it was.

"It's in the family Bible," she said. I could hear her riffling through, pulling it from its spot between the yellowed pages. There it was, in the Bible. Of course! It was a family recipe as essential to our history as the births and deaths written in the front. I asked mom to describe it. It was worn, she said. Was it hand-written? No, she said.

"I think it's torn from a cookie magazine," she said.

The rest of the small magazine, "Betty Crocker's Festive Fixin's with a Foreign Flair," was folded up in the recipe box. Its '50s-era cover photo depicted creepy-looking dolls dressed in costumes from different countries, circled around a bowl of Chex mix. I hung up. The taste of my origin, tucked in the family Bible, was a Betty Crocker "Foreign Fixin'." I felt cheated.

I put all the recipes back in the box. A few looked a little used. They were simple Italian preparations. "Hot Spaghetti with Cold Tomato Sauce." "A somewhat exotic but very interesting concoction called Cous-Cous." It occurred to me that even though she was in Alaska, purposely severed from where she came from, she still pored over the food section in the local paper, with its Jell-O salads and potato-chip-topped casseroles, looking for glimmers of home. Starting over for her meant laying old troubles to rest, but it also meant leaving behind things she was attached to. Some fresh starts are like that. There's a little bitter with the sweet.

I decided I'd make Betty Crocker's biscotti anyway. Even if the recipe wasn't from the old country, it was tradition now, to celebrate starting over with a familiar taste from years gone by.

Nonna's Biscotti
(from "Betty Crocker's Festive Fixin's with a Foreign Flair")

• 2 eggs
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 tsp anise seeds
• 1 cup flour

Pre-heat oven to 375.
Grease and flour a loaf pan.
Beat eggs and sugar thoroughly. Add anise. Gradually add flour. Stir until smooth.
Pour in the loaf pan (it should be about 1/4 filled). Bake for 20 minutes, remove from pan and slice into 16 thin slices.
Place on a sheet pan and put back in the oven, 5 minutes on a side.