No. 899

Croustades of Gnocquis a la Rivoli

Croustades de Gnocquis a la Rivoli

Prepare a gnocquis paste with half a pound of flour, half a pound of fecula, one quart of milk, five ounces of butter, fifteen raw egg-yolks and one whole egg, some salt, sugar, nutmeg and four tablespoonfuls of grated parmesan cheese. Put into a bowl the flour, fecula, cheese, salt, sugar and nutmeg, and incorporate in slowly two and a half ounces of butter, eight egg-yolks and the whole egg, work them well together, then add the remainder of the butter and eggs; butter some six-sided molds two and a quarter inches in diameter, two inches wide at the bottom, and one inch and an eighth in height, fill with the gnocquis paste and then poach them; when cold unmold, dip them in eggs and bread-crumbs, and mark a place on top for a cover, fry them a fine color and empty the insides to fill with a salpicon of truffles, mushrooms and unsmoked red beef tongue, small delicate chicken quenelle balls, serve with a brown sauce (No. 414), reduced with meat juice and tomato essence. Dress them on a folded napkin.

← No. 898 Croustades, Carolina Style Hot Side Dishes No. 900 Croustades Perretti →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a pastry cook on hand, and this entry assumes you can read past its own gaps. Two things need settling before you start: what fecula is, and where the milk goes.

The milk is the hingeThe ingredient list calls for a quart of milk, but the method never adds it: it goes from dry ingredients to butter and eggs and stops. The likeliest reading is a panada-style paste — milk scalded with the butter, flour and fecula stirred in to a thick paste, the eggs beaten in off the heat once it has cooled enough not to scramble them — though that reverses the cold, bowl-mixed order the text actually prints. Made literally as written, without the milk, the dough is very stiff.
FeculaNineteenth-century French-American kitchen French for pure starch, in practice potato starch. Cornstarch is the nearest substitute and behaves similarly here; it gives the poached gnocchi their tender, almost custardy set.
Poaching, not boiling"Poach them" means the filled molds go into a water bath held at a bare tremble, not a rolling boil, which would blow the paste and curdle the egg; the book gives no temperature. They must then be chilled completely before unmolding — the recipe's own "when cold unmold" — or they will collapse.
The moldsSix-sided timbale molds of that size are collectors' items now. Small dariole molds, metal pastry rings on a lined tray, or a mini-muffin tin of similar capacity (about 2 fl oz) all work; the point is a straight-sided shape you can hollow out and cap.
FryingBreaded and fried at 350-360F until deep gold, three to four minutes. Score the lid before frying, as directed — cutting it after, while the croustade is hot and full of steam, tears the crust.
Salpicon and sauceSalpicon means everything cut to an even small dice. "Unsmoked red beef tongue" is plain brined tongue, the pink cured kind sold cooked at delicatessens, not smoked tongue. No. 414 is Ranhofer's Espagnole; a good reduced demi-glace sharpened with tomato is the modern equivalent.
YieldEnough for roughly twenty croustades of the size given, though the total depends on how the milk is handled; the recipe scales down by half if you weigh rather than count the eggs.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in print. Gnocchi arrived in this kind of cooking not from Italian home cooking but through the French professional tradition, where gnocchi à la romaine meant a stiff semolina or panada paste, poached, cut, and gratinated with Parmesan — a technique closer to quenelles than to the potato dumplings the word suggests today. Ranhofer takes that paste one step further by molding it, hollowing it and treating it as a croustade, a little edible case; a hot side dish in a Delmonico's menu occupied the space between fish and roast with something ornamental and labor-intensive. The Rivoli name, like most such garnish names in the book, reads as a dining-room label rather than a documented origin — Ranhofer names dishes after streets, battles and patrons freely, and salpicons of truffle, mushroom, tongue and quenelle recur under other titles in these pages.