No. 312

Gnocquis Soup a la Pagioli

Potage aux Gnocquis a la Pagioli

To Make the Gnocquis.-Put a pint of milk into a saucepan on the fire with two ounces of butter, salt, nutmeg and a pinch of cayenne pepper. At the first boil remove the saucepan and add to its contents sufficient flour to make a thin paste; dry this paste on a slow fire, stirring constantly until it no longer adheres to the pan, then remove it from the fire to allow the paste to cool off a little, and then incorporate into it seven or eight eggs. Pour this paste into a linen bag furnished with a socket having an opening of an eighth of an inch, boil some water in a saucepan, add to it a little salt, and force the paste through the socket in the form of strings into it in order to poach it, and when firm, drain them and range them in a vegetable dish, alternating layers of gnocquis with grated parmesan cheese, then brown the whole in the oven. Serve with a separate tureen full of consomme.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is pâte à choux — the same paste as cream puffs, made with milk instead of water — piped into simmering water and baked with parmesan, then flooded at table with clear consommé. Two things in the original need adjusting before you start: the flour is unmeasured and the egg count is high.

The hinge: eggs by feel, not by countBeat them in one at a time and stop when the paste is glossy and just holds a soft peak on the spoon. Seven or eight eggs is in line with standard choux proportions for a pint of milk and the quantity of flour given below, so the original count is not out of order; judge by the paste, not the tally.
The unmeasured flour"Sufficient flour to make a thin paste" is genuinely ambiguous. For a pint (2 cups) of milk and 2 oz butter, standard choux proportions are about 9 oz (2 cups) of flour, added all at once off the heat and then dried over low heat for two or three minutes until a film forms on the pan bottom.
Pint and ouncesA pint here is the US pint, 2 cups. Two ounces of butter is half a stick.
The linen bag and socketA piping bag with a plain round tip. An eighth-inch opening is too fine for choux this stiff — use 3/8 to 1/2 inch and cut the strings off with a knife at the pan's edge, in the manner of gnocchi parisienne.
Poach, do not boilSalted water at a bare shiver, 175-185F. A rolling boil tears the strings apart. They sink, then rise; give them a minute after they surface, then lift out with a skimmer onto a towel.
BrowningLayer in a buttered gratin dish with grated parmesan and brown at 425F for 12-15 minutes, or under the broiler for 3-4. A dot of butter over the top helps the crust colour.
The consomméIt must be a proper clear consommé, hot and well seasoned, and it goes to table in its own tureen so the gratin does not soften before it is served. Count on about 6 oz of broth per portion.
YieldThe full quantity of paste makes enough for eight to ten soup portions. Halve it for a household dinner.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house habit of running Italian dishes through a French hand: the spelling gnocquis is a Frenchified rendering of gnocchi, and the method is not the potato dumpling most readers picture but choux paste poached in water — the preparation known in French kitchens as gnocchi à la parisienne, generally traced to the same nineteenth-century pastry technique that produced éclairs and pommes dauphine. The dish sits in the soup chapter because of the way it was served: the gratin came to the table with a separate tureen of consommé, a garnish-plus-broth arrangement found in elaborate menus of the period, where a clear soup was expected but the garnish was where the cook showed his hand. "A la Pagioli" is one of the many proper names attached to dishes in Ranhofer's book; whom or what it refers to the text does not record.