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Gnocchi of Milk--a Dessert
1 cup of milk I level tablespoon of powdered starch 2 or 3 drops of vanilla extract 2 yolks of eggs 2 tablespoons of sugar Put all these ingredients together into a saucepan and mix together with a wooden spoon for a few moments. Then put onto the back of the stove where it is not too hot, and cook until the mixture has become stiff. Cook a few moments longer, stirring always; then turn out onto a bread-board and spread to a thickness of a finger and a half. When cold, cut into diamonds or squares the width of two fingers. Butter a baking-dish, and put the squares into it over-lapping each other. Add a few dabs of butter here and there. Put another layer of the squares in the dish, more dabs of butter, and so on until the dish is full. Brown in the oven.
A stovetop custard stiffened with starch, chilled, cut and baked — the sweet cousin of gnocchi alla romana. The hinge is heat control: the mixture must thicken without ever simmering hard, or the yolks curdle and the paste will not slice cleanly.
- "Powdered starch"Cornstarch or potato starch, both sold as fine white powder in 1912. Either works; potato starch sets glossier, cornstarch firmer.
- The starch quantity is lowOne level tablespoon of starch to a cup of milk is very little; with two yolks it will thicken, but toward a soft pudding rather than a paste that can be spread and cut. Comparable cooked-paste gnocchi, semolina ones especially, carry a good deal more thickener per cup of milk. Treat the original figure as unreliable and thicken until the mixture pulls away from the pan in a mass.
- "The back of the stove where it is not too hot"On a coal range the back was the cool zone. On a modern hob this means low heat, or a bowl over simmering water, with constant stirring — an egg-yolk custard will curdle somewhere around 180F, so keep it well below a hard simmer.
- Finger measurements"A finger and a half" thick is roughly an inch; squares "the width of two fingers" are perhaps an inch and a half across — the book is not precise. Spread on a lightly oiled or dampened board, or on parchment, rather than bare wood.
- Chilling"When cold" means thoroughly cold — an hour or more in the refrigerator. Warm paste tears instead of cutting.
- "Brown in the oven"The book gives no temperature. A hot oven for 10 to 15 minutes, until the butter is bubbling and the edges are freckled, is the intent. A short spell under the broiler finishes the top if it is still pale.
- Sweetness and finishingTwo tablespoons of sugar to a cup of milk is restrained by modern dessert standards. A dusting of sugar and cinnamon over the assembled layers before baking is in keeping with the style.
- YieldA cup of milk fills a small gratin dish and serves two, perhaps three. Scale up by whole cups; the mixture behaves the same at larger volumes but takes longer to thicken.
Baked gnocchi cut from a stiff cooked paste rather than shaped from dough is a Roman habit — gnocchi alla romana, made with semolina, layered with butter and cheese and browned. This is the dessert version, a milk-and-egg custard set with starch and treated the same way, and it belongs to the wide family of Italian sweets built on thickened milk, the same principle behind latte fritto and crema fritta, where a firm custard is cut into pieces and then fried or baked. The book is Simple Italian Cookery (1912) by Antonia Isola, the pen name used by Mabel Earl McGinnis, one of the earliest English-language collections aimed at American cooks who had encountered Italian food but had no reliable instructions for it — which explains the finger-widths and the "back of the stove", directions written for a kitchen with a coal range and no measuring rulers.