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Roman Gnocchi
1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup cornstarch. 2 cups milk 2 egg yolks 3/4 cup grated cheese Melt the butter and cook the cornstarch and flour in it without browning. Add the milk and cook three minutes, stirring constantly. Add the yolks and a half cup of cheese; pour into a shallow buttered pan and cool; cut into squares; place on a shallow dish; sprinkle with the remaining cheese and brown in the oven.
A stiff milk panade, chilled, cut and gratinated — the semolina-free version of gnocchi alla romana. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete, so a few quantities have to be reasoned out.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives only milk, yolks and cheese; the butter, cornstarch and flour called for in the method have no amounts. For 2 cups milk a workable panade is about 3 tablespoons butter with 3 tablespoons flour and 3 tablespoons cornstarch, but this is an inference, not what the book says.
- The hingeThe paste must be thick enough to set firm when cold, or the squares will slump on the dish. Three minutes of cooking is the minimum; keep going until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan in a mass and a spoon leaves a clean track.
- Yolks off the heatAdd the egg yolks after the pan comes off the burner and beat them in fast, then return it briefly. Dropped into a boiling roux they scramble and the finished squares turn grainy.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese"; that could be dry Parmesan or a hard aged domestic cheese, and the book does not specify. Pre-grated cheese with anti-caking starch will make the paste pasty; grate it yourself.
- Cooling and cuttingSpread about 1/2 inch deep and chill until properly cold and firm — an hour in the refrigerator, not the ten minutes on a counter the word "cool" implies. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water.
- Browning"Brown in the oven" gives no temperature. A hot oven, around 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes will do it, or the broiler for 3 to 4 minutes if the squares are already at room temperature. Dot with butter first; cheese alone over a cold starch square browns unevenly.
- YieldTwo cups of milk gives enough for about four servings, as a vegetable-course side or a light supper dish with tomato sauce; the number of squares depends on how thick you spread the paste.
Gnocchi alla romana are squares or discs of cooked semolina, enriched with butter, cheese and egg, chilled and then baked — a distinct thing from the potato dumplings most English speakers now mean by gnocchi. In American cookbooks of the early twentieth century, the semolina was sometimes replaced with a flour-and-cornstarch white sauce, which was the sort of thing a domestic-science-trained cook already had in hand. And the American gratin instinct — cheese on top, brown in the oven — did the rest.