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Ravioli of Curds and Spinach
1 small bunch of spinach 1/2 pound of curds Cook the spinach, drain, and chop up fine, add the curds, one egg, salt and pepper, dash of nutmeg, and a little grated cheese. Add to the paste, and boil as before.
This is a filling, not a complete dish: the book assumes you have already read the preceding ravioli entry for the dough and the boiling. A few of its terms have shifted since 1912.
- "Curds" means ricotta"Curds" -- Almost certainly fresh, drained cheese curd: ricotta as sold today, or a well-drained fresh farmer's cheese. The book does not define the term. Half a pound is about one cup. Do not substitute cottage cheese without draining it in a sieve for an hour, or the filling will weep and split the dough.
- "A small bunch of spinach"Read this as about one pound of untrimmed leaf spinach, which cooks down to roughly a cup. The quantity is elastic; the filling should hold its shape on a spoon.
- The hinge: squeeze the spinach dry"Cook, drain, and chop up fine" understates it. Wring the cooked spinach in a towel until no more water comes out, then chop. Wet filling is the commonest cause of ravioli bursting in the pot.
- "A little grated cheese"Parmesan or a dry pecorino, two to three tablespoons. It is there for salt and savour as much as body, so season the filling only after the cheese is in.
- "Add to the paste"The dough is the one given in the preceding ravioli recipe: roll it thin, dot with teaspoons of filling, cover, and seal firmly with a wet fingertip, pressing out air pockets before cutting.
- "Boil as before"Fresh filled pasta needs a large pot of well-salted water at a bare, rolling-but-not-violent boil, three to five minutes from the moment they surface.
- YieldThis quantity of filling makes roughly 40 to 50 ravioli of about 1½ inches — four servings as a first course, two or three as a main.
- ServingMelted butter and grated cheese, or a plain tomato sauce, both suit it. Sage in the butter goes well with spinach and ricotta, though the recipe does not call for it.
Spinach-and-ricotta filling is often said to be among the oldest ideas of what goes inside Italian filled pasta — versions of a green herb-and-cheese stuffing appear in Italian manuscript cookery well before the modern ravioli, alongside meat and other mixtures, and the same mixture, bound with egg and nutmeg, turns up as gnudi, malfatti and the filling for tortelli depending on the region. Nutmeg in a cheese filling is traditionally understood as more than decorative fussiness, a habit generally traced to an era when imported spice was the mark of a proper stuffing. This book, published in 1912 by an American writing under the name Antonia Isola, was among the first to put plain Italian home cooking into English for readers who had no Italian grandmother to copy; its terseness — "boil as before" — assumes a cook working straight through a chapter rather than dipping into a single page, and it speaks of "curds" rather than ricotta.