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Gnocchis, Italienne
Place three gills milk and one gill cream in a saucepan with half ounce butter and boil for five minutes. Sift a pound of flour in a bowl, then gradually pour milk in flour, briskly stirring with wooden spoon while adding it. Add one ounce grated Parmesan cheese, with a half teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne, and sharply stir for two minutes; break in an egg and briskly stir again for two minutes; then add two egg yolks and sharply stir for two minutes more.
Have two quarts boiling water in a saucepan on the fire with a teaspoon salt. Take up the batter by teaspoons and with aid of a finger drop it in the water, the operation being done as rapidly as possible. Let slowly boil for six minutes, lift up with skimmer, drain on a cloth, then dress on a hot baking dish. Reduce two gills tomato sauce to half the quantity on a brisk fire and pour it over the gnocchis, sprinkle two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese on top, then set in oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
This is not the potato gnocchi most cooks expect, nor the semolina gnocchi alla Romana. It is a choux-paste dumpling — closer to what French kitchens call gnocchi à la parisienne — poached, sauced and glazed.
- The flour is the problemThree gills milk and one gill cream is 2 cups of liquid, and a pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups. Choux paste of this kind wants roughly equal volumes, so expect to use around 9 oz (2 cups) of flour and add more only until the paste pulls cleanly from the pan sides. Following the pound literally gives a dough too dry to take the eggs.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is usually reckoned at about 1/4 teaspoon — the cayenne is a background warmth, not heat.
- Cook the paste, do not just scald the milkBoiling the milk five minutes only reduces it. Bring the milk, cream and butter to a boil, add the flour all at once, and beat over the heat for two or three minutes until the paste is glossy and leaves a film on the pan bottom. That drying is what lets the eggs be absorbed.
- Eggs go in off the heatLet the paste cool a few minutes before the whole egg and the two yolks, or they will scramble. Beat each addition in fully; the finished paste should fall heavily from the spoon.
- Poach, never boilTwo quarts of salted water at a bare shiver — 180-190F — for 6 to 8 minutes. A rolling boil tears these dumplings apart. They are done when they float and feel set; poach a single test spoonful first, and if it disintegrates beat a little more flour into the paste.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature; 'set in oven' for ten minutes to glaze the cheese implies a fairly hot oven. The gnocchi are already cooked; you are only browning.
- The tomato sauceTwo gills is 1 cup, reduced to 1/2 cup — a thick, concentrated coating rather than a pool. A plain reduced passata or a simple tomato sauce works; anything sweet or heavily herbed fights the Parmesan.
- YieldThis makes a large batch. Serve immediately — they slump as they cool.
Gnocchi is generally traced to the Italian for a lump or knuckle, and in the nineteenth century the word covered any small boiled dumpling rather than the potato version that now dominates. What Filippini gives here, filed under "Italienne," is really the French restaurant form: a milk-and-butter panade enriched with eggs and Parmesan, piped or spooned into water, then gratinated — the same construction as cream-puff paste, and known in French kitchens as gnocchi à la parisienne. That blurring is characteristic of The International Cook Book, which came out of the Delmonico's tradition in New York, where a professional brigade trained in French method wrote up the dishes of half of Europe in the technique it knew best. The finishing step — sauce, grated cheese, a short blast of heat — is the standard gratin logic applied to a dumpling.