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Tagliatelli
Make a paste with flour and water and a little salt, and roll it out quite thin. Cut this out into strips of about half a finger's breadth. Throw them into boiling water, and let them boil a few minutes. Then remove them to cold water, and drain them on a sieve. Place at the bottom of a dish some butter and grated cheese, then a layer of the tagliatelli made as above, seasoned with pepper, another layer of butter and cheese, and another of tagliatelli, and so on until the whole is used. Pour over it a glass of cream, add a layer of cheese, add a layer of cheese, and bake in the oven until brown.
A plain flour-and-water pasta, boiled, layered with butter and cheese and browned — essentially a baked tagliatelle gratin. The original gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are the working ones.
- The doughFlour and water with salt, no egg: reckon on about 2 cups (250 g) flour to roughly 1/2 cup water, worked to a firm dough and rested 30 minutes before rolling. Eggless dough tends to be stiffer and less supple than egg pasta, so roll it thin — it swells in the water.
- "Half a finger's breadth"Something like 3/8 to 1/2 inch wide, broader than modern tagliatelle and closer to a narrow pappardelle. Cut the sheet by rolling it loosely and slicing across.
- Boiling time"A few minutes" means two to three for fresh pasta this thin, and less if rolled very fine. It goes into the oven afterwards and will soften further, so pull it while still firm.
- The cold waterShocking and draining stops the cooking and keeps the strands from matting into a block while you build the layers. Toss the drained pasta with a little of the butter before layering, or the bottom layer will stick.
- "A glass of cream"A wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml) in books of this period, half a gill; "a glass" is imprecise, so take it as a small quantity, 1/4 to 1/2 cup. Pour it over the assembled dish so it sinks between the layers rather than sitting on top.
- The cheeseGrated hard cheese is implied: Parmesan is the likeliest, or a firm pecorino, though an English kitchen might have used a dry English cheese. The repeated "add a layer of cheese" in the last line looks like a printer's duplication rather than two separate layers.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A hot oven, 400–425F, for 20 to 25 minutes gets the top brown before the pasta beneath dries out; finish under the broiler if the surface is pale.
- YieldThe working quantities above support four servings as a first course or two as a main. Use a shallow dish — the point is browned surface, not depth.
The name comes from the Italian tagliare, to cut, describing how the rolled sheet is sliced into ribbons; nineteenth-century English books spell it variously tagliatelli, taglierini and tagliolini, often without distinguishing the widths. What is striking here is the method: rather than dressing the pasta and serving it at once, the recipe builds it into layers with butter and cheese and browns it, which is often said to be how Victorian kitchens naturalised unfamiliar foreign dishes eing like a gratin or a baked pudding. The eggless flour-and-water dough is generally associated with the more southern Italian style, and it was also the cheapest, requiring nothing a plain kitchen did not already have.