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Ravioli with Meat
Prepare the paste as in the preceding receipt.
Take whatever meat is desired--chicken, turkey, or veal--this must always be cooked. (Left-over meat may be utilized this way.) Chop the meat very fine, add one tablespoon of grated Parmesan cheese, one egg, a dash of nutmeg, a dash of grated lemon-peel, one tablespoon of butter, cold. Mix these ingredients in a bowl. Take a teaspoon of the mixture and put it into the extended paste, about two inches from the edge. Take another spoonful and put it about two inches away from the first spoonful. Continue to do this until you have a row of teaspoonfuls across the paste. Then fold over the edge of the paste so as to cover the spoonfuls of mixture, and cut across the paste at the bottom of them. Then cut into squares with the meat in the middle of each square; press down the paste a little at the edges so the meat cannot fall out. Continue to do this until all the meat and the paste are used up. Put the little squares of paste and meat into the boiling salted water a few at a time, and boil for ten minutes. Serve with tomato sauce, or butter and grated Parmesan cheese.
A filled-pasta recipe that assumes you already have the egg dough from the previous page and a bowl of yesterday's roast. The proportions are given per egg of filling rather than by weight, so read it as a ratio and scale to whatever meat you have.
- The paste it refers toThe "preceding receipt" is the pasta dough given on the previous page; this recipe assumes you already have it. Roll it thin, since the dough doubles where it folds over the filling.
- Filling proportionsThe recipe gives no quantity of meat. One egg, a tablespoon each of Parmesan and cold butter, nutmeg and lemon zest will bind roughly a cupful of finely chopped cooked meat. If the mixture is loose, more cheese rather than more egg.
- Cooked meat onlyThe instruction that the meat "must always be cooked" is the hinge. Nothing in ten minutes of boiling reliably cooks a raw meat interior inside sealed pasta, and the recipe is written as a way to use up roast chicken, turkey or veal.
- Boiling timeTen minutes suits a thick hand-rolled sheet. Thin fresh ravioli made today are usually done in 3 to 5 minutes, floating and with the seam no longer chalky; prolonged boiling risks bursting them.
- SealingPressing the edges with dry fingers only works if the dough is still tacky. If the sheet has begun to dry, brush a little water along the fold and the cut lines before pressing, and push the air out toward the edge as you go.
- Into the water a few at a timeWorth taking literally. A crowded pot drops off the boil and the ravioli sit and soften at the seams; lift them out with a slotted spoon rather than draining through a colander.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield or number of servings. Butter and Parmesan is the lighter of the two finishes and shows the nutmeg and lemon better than tomato sauce does.
Simple Italian Cookery was published in 1912 by Antonia Isola, the pen name of Mabel Earl McGinnis, and was among the earlier books to put plain Italian home cooking in front of an American middle-class audience. The filling here is northern in character: cooked meat bound with egg and Parmesan and seasoned with nutmeg and lemon peel, a combination found across Emilia and Lombardy in the various tortelli and agnolotti of the region, where filled pasta was often a way of stretching the remains of a roast. The name ravioli has been linked variously to rapa and to the verb ravvolgere, to wrap up, though neither derivation is settled; the word appears in Italian sources well before the sixteenth century. Laying the filling in a row along one edge and folding the sheet over it, rather than using two separate sheets, is one long-established single-sheet method.