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Pepper (Sift flour on a board make)
Sift flour on a board, make depression in centre, drop in one-half egg, and moisten with warm water to a stiff dough. Knead until smooth, cover, and let stand ten minutes; then roll as thin as a sheet of paper, using a rolling-pin. Cut in strips as long as paste, and two and three-fourth inches wide, using a pastry jagger. Mix cracker crumbs, spinach, and egg; moisten with stock and season with salt and pepper. Put mixture by three-fourths teaspoon on lower half of strips of paste, two inches apart. Fold upper part of paste over lower part. Press edges together and between mixture with tips of thumbs, then cut apart, using pastry jagger. Cook ten minutes in the liquor in which a fowl has been cooked, take up with skimmer, arrange a layer on hot serving dish, sprinkle generously with grated Parmesan cheese, cover with Tomato Sauce; repeat twice and serve at once.
This is a spinach ravioli, made and boiled in fowl broth and layered with Parmesan and tomato sauce. The method is complete even though the quantities are not, and it works on feel the way pasta dough always has.
- The hinge: dough thickness"As thin as a sheet of paper" is not rhetoric. Rolled thick, the double layer of paste at the sealed edges stays stodgy after ten minutes of cooking. Roll until you can see the board through it, and keep the sheet covered while you work so it does not dry and refuse to seal.
- ProportionsThe original quantities are not given here. The dough is one-half egg plus warm water worked into flour to a stiff paste; about a cup of flour will take that much liquid, adding water by feel. The filling is cracker crumbs, cooked chopped spinach and egg in a ratio that will just hold a shape on a spoon.
- "One-half egg"Beat a whole egg and use half of it by volume, about 1 1/2 tablespoons. Old recipes split eggs freely; there is no need to guess.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda crackers are meant rather than a heavily salted modern one. Use unsalted cracker crumbs or dry white breadcrumbs, and season the filling yourself, since salted crackers plus stock plus Parmesan stacks up fast.
- Pastry jaggerA small fluted cutting wheel. A fluted pasta wheel or plain pizza cutter does the same job; the crimped edge is decorative and also helps the seal hold.
- SealingPress with the thumbs both around the outside and between each mound of filling so no air is trapped. Trapped air expands in the broth and splits the parcels.
- Cooking liquid"The liquor in which a fowl has been cooked" is chicken broth, ideally unsalted or lightly salted since it is not served. Keep it at a bare simmer; a rolling boil tears fresh ravioli. Ten minutes is right for paper-thin paste with a cooked filling.
- Assembly and yieldAssembly -- Build three layers, each with cheese and tomato sauce, and serve immediately; ravioli held in a warm dish absorb sauce and go soft. Yield cannot be worked out, as the recipe gives no flour quantity.
Ravioli entered American cookbooks slowly, and its filing under cereals rather than a course of its own says a great deal about how pasta was understood around 1900: as a farinaceous food, kin to macaroni, rice and hominy, rather than as Italian cooking in its own right. The technique described here resembles orthodox northern Italian practice, filling laid in rows on a single sheet folded over itself, and the spinach-and-cheese stuffing is often said to be among the oldest of all ravioli fillings. What marks it as a New England book is the cracker crumbs standing in for ricotta or breadcrumb panada, and the assumption that a cook would have a pot of fowl broth already going.