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Gnocchi a la Romana
1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup corn-starch 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups scalded milk Yolks 2 eggs 3/4 cup grated cheese Melt butter, and when bubbling, add flour, corn-starch, salt, and milk, gradually. Cook three minutes, stirring constantly. Add yolks of eggs slightly beaten, and one-half cup cheese. Pour into a buttered shallow pan, and cool. Turn on a board, cut in squares, diamonds, or strips. Place on a platter, sprinkle with remaining cheese, and brown in oven.
This is a stiff milk panade cut into shapes and browned, closer to a set béchamel than to potato dumplings. The hinge is the cooling: if the slab is not cold and firm all the way through, it will not cut cleanly.
- Cook the paste longer than three minutesThree minutes over direct heat is the minimum to lose the raw flour taste; the mixture should be thick enough to pull away from the pan in a mass. Stir constantly with a wooden spoon or flat whisk, since a starch this heavy scorches quickly.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks with a spoonful of the hot paste before adding them to the pan, and work off the heat. Dropped straight into a boiling starch they will set into threads.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this period and this dish means Parmesan or a similar hard grating cheese. Three-quarters of a cup grated fine is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 oz.
- Pan depth and coolingSpread the paste about 1/2 inch thick in a buttered shallow pan; the yield here is small, so an 8-inch square pan is nearer the mark than a quarter-sheet. Cool at room temperature, then refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight, before turning out and cutting.
- BrowningUse a buttered ovenproof dish rather than a serving platter, and overlap the pieces slightly. The recipe gives no temperature; a hot oven, around 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler once heated through, gives the crust the recipe is after. A little melted butter over the top before it goes in helps.
- YieldTwo cups of milk makes enough for four as a light entrée or six as a side. It reheats well, which is part of the point of the make-ahead slab.
- Flour and cornstarchThe half-and-half mixture here stands in for the semolina used in Italy. It sets softer and browns paler; substituting fine semolina for both, in the same total volume, gives the firmer, grainier texture of the original dish.
Gnocchi alla romana is the Roman school of gnocchi: not potato dumplings but semolina cooked to a paste with milk, spread, cooled, cut into rounds or lozenges, and baked with butter and cheese. The name simply means "dumplings in the Roman manner," distinguishing it from the potato and flour versions of the north. Its appearance in an American household manual of this era reflects the way turn-of-the-century cookery writing absorbed Italian and French dishes into the "entrée" chapter, often rebuilt from pantry staples an American cook already had — here flour and cornstarch in place of semolina. The technique itself, a starch-thickened milk paste stiffened with egg and set firm enough to slice, was familiar territory: the same method underlies fried cream, croquette panades, and polenta.