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One Egg (Little Water)
A little Water.
A teaspoonful of Salt.
Pound these ingredients (except the tomato sauce) in a mortar; then pass them through a wire sieve; season with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and chopped parsley. Make the paste in this way:
Make a hole in the middle of the flour and break the egg into it; melt a teaspoonful of salt in a little water; add this to the egg, and work them all well together until a smooth ball is formed; fold this paste in a cloth and let it stand for an hour. If it is too stiff, add a few drops of water; it should be a stiff paste. Now roll the paste out very thin, and cut it into broad strips about an inch wide; put some of the forcemeat on these in small heaps; wet all round the edges; lay a second strip of paste over and press well together between the little heaps; stamp them out with a small round cutter; boil them gently in salted water for about ten minutes. Drain them on a cloth, put them on a deep dish, sprinkle Parmesan cheese over them, and sauce them over with tomato sauce. Nouilles paste, seasoned with cheese, grated nutmeg, and pepper and salt, cut, into thin small strips boiled in salted water, and finished in white sauce, can be served as a separate dish, leaving out the ravioli farce altogether.
This is a ravioli entry from a section of savouries, and it has come down to us with its ingredient list mangled — only the egg, water and salt for the pasta survive. Read it as a method rather than a complete formula.
- The missing fillingThe forcemeat ingredients are lost; all that remains is the instruction to pound them, sieve them, and season with pepper, salt, nutmeg and parsley. A period ravioli farce of this kind would typically be braised veal or chicken with spinach or chard and grated Parmesan, bound with egg — but the original quantities here are simply not recoverable.
- Pasta proportionsOne egg with a teaspoonful of salt dissolved in a little water will take roughly 100 g (about 3/4 cup) of flour to reach the stiff ball described. Add flour or water a few drops at a time; the dough should be noticeably firmer than a bread dough.
- The hinge: rest the doughThe hour's rest wrapped in a cloth is not optional padding. A stiff egg dough is unrollable until the gluten relaxes and the flour hydrates fully; skip it and the sheet tears rather than stretches.
- Mortar and sievePounding in a mortar and passing through a wire sieve is doing what a food processor now does in seconds. Pulse the cooked meat and greens to a fine paste, then push it through a medium sieve if you want the smooth, close texture the original intends.
- Sealing between the heapsWetting the edges and pressing firmly between each mound of filling before stamping is what keeps them shut in the water. Any trapped air will expand and burst the seam, so press outward from each heap.
- Ten minutes is rightFresh pasta this thin cooks in two or three minutes, but a raw or barely warmed meat filling needs the full time. If your filling is already cooked through, four to five minutes at a gentle simmer is enough — a hard boil will split them.
- NouillesNouilles is simply the French for noodles: the same egg paste cut into narrow ribbons. The closing note offers them as a separate dish, seasoned with cheese, nutmeg, pepper and salt, boiled in salted water and finished in white sauce, with the ravioli farce left out altogether.
- YieldThe recipe gives no flour quantity and no cutter size, so the yield cannot be fixed; expect two dozen or so small stamped rounds from a one-egg paste, enough for a savoury course for a few people.
Ravioli appear in English high-class cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often under the heading of savouries and hors d'oeuvre, though period books also place the dish as an entrée or garnish: a small, showy Italian item served in a deep dish with Parmesan and tomato sauce, at the end of a dinner or as a light entrée. The technical vocabulary here is French, not Italian — farce for the filling, nouilles for the noodles — because the professional kitchens these books were written for worked in French terminology regardless of a dish's origin. The stamped-round shape and the trick of laying one strip of paste over another with heaps of filling between are both standard restaurant practice of the period, and survive largely unchanged. The ingredient list at the top of this entry is garbled, with a heading or a line of quantities apparently missing.