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RAVIOLI, ITALIAN (another way)
Make some nicely-flavoured forcemeat as follows. Take two ounces of the flesh of roast chicken or game, weighed after it has been freed from skin and sinew. Mince it finely, and mix with it a table-spoonful of borage which has been scalded, pounded, and passed through a sieve; failing this, use a table-spoonful of spinach greening. Add an ounce of pounded ham, four cleaned and pounded anchovies, a shallot, three hard and two raw yolks of eggs, a table-spoonful of grated Parmesan, and a little pepper and grated nutmeg. Mix the ingredients thoroughly. Roll out half a pound of fine paste as thin as possible, cut it into rounds two inches in diameter with a fluted cutter, moisten the edges with water, and lay a small ball of the forcemeat upon each round. Fold the pastry over the forcemeat, and pinch it tightly together. Let the ravioli dry for a short time. Butter a saucepan, lay them in it, pour a little boiling stock over them, and let them simmer until the pastry is done enough. Drain them, lay them on a dish, sprinkle a little grated Parmesan over, and lay little pieces of butter here and there upon them. Put them in a brisk oven for a quarter of an hour, pour a little good gravy round them, and serve very hot. To make the nouilles paste put half a pound of flour on a pastry-board, make a hole in the centre, break two eggs into it, add half an ounce of butter and a pinch of salt, and mix all together to a smooth, firm paste; it is then ready for use. Time to simmer the ravioli, five minutes.
A filled pasta closer to an agnolotti than to a modern boiled ravioli: the parcels are poached briefly in stock, then browned in the oven with butter and Parmesan. The instructions are workable as written once a few terms are converted.
- Read the paste recipe firstThe nouilles paste is described at the end but needed at the start: 8 oz flour, 2 eggs, 1/2 oz butter, a pinch of salt. Two eggs to 8 oz flour is a dry dough by modern standards; knead it for a good ten minutes and rest it wrapped for 30 minutes before rolling, or add a teaspoon of water at a time until it comes together.
- "Brisk oven"Roughly 400-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is for colour on the cheese and butter, not for cooking the pasta, which is already done from the poaching.
- Spinach greeningA Victorian kitchen staple: raw spinach pounded, the juice pressed out and gently heated until the green solids coagulate, then drained. It was used as colouring. Blanched spinach squeezed very dry and finely chopped gives the same effect here. Borage leaves, the first choice, are cucumber-scented and sold at herb nurseries rather than supermarkets.
- Three hard and two raw yolksNot a misprint. The cooked yolks bind and dry the mince; the raw ones set during cooking and hold the ball together. Sieve the hard yolks so they distribute evenly.
- AnchoviesFour salt-packed anchovies, rinsed and boned, or eight oil-packed fillets. With an ounce of ham and a spoonful of Parmesan already in the mix, add no salt until you have tasted.
- "Fold the pastry over"Two-inch rounds folded in half give half-moons, not the square modern ravioli. Press out air as you seal, and moisten sparingly -- too much water makes the crimp slip apart in the stock.
- TimingFive minutes in barely simmering stock, as the closing line says; the earlier phrase "until the pastry is done enough" invites overcooking. Keep the liquid at a bare tremble or the seams burst. A single layer in a wide buttered pan, turned once.
- Yield8 oz of flour and this quantity of forcemeat make roughly 24 to 30 two-inch parcels -- a first course for four, or a light main for two.
Cassell's gives ravioli as an Italian dish but treats it in the French manner its readers knew: a pounded forcemeat of game, ham and anchovy, poached in stock and then gratinated with butter and Parmesan. That is much closer to Piedmontese agnolotti del plin, traditionally a way of using up roast meat, than to the ricotta-and-spinach filling most English readers now expect; the roast chicken or game "weighed after it has been freed from skin and sinew" is frankly leftovers. The label nouilles paste for the dough suggests the route by which the dish may have arrived -- through French professional kitchens rather than directly from Italy, nouilles being the French for noodles. Borage, first choice for the green, was a common kitchen herb in Britain into the nineteenth century and has largely retreated to the flower border; the fallback of "spinach greening" reflects a period fondness for coloured forcemeats, where green, pink and gold fillings were part of the visual grammar of a formal table.