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Gnocchis Russe
Place three gills milk and a half gill white wine in a saucepan and boil for ten minutes. Sift a pound flour into a bowl, then gradually pour milk in bowl, briskly stir while adding it. Add an ounce grated Parmesan cheese, a teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply stir for two minutes, crack in one egg, stir for two minutes more, then add two egg yolks and briskly stir for eight minutes longer. Have two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt in a saucepan on the fire, then take up batter by teaspoons, and with the aid of a finger drop into the boiling water. (The whole operation should be done as rapidly as possible.) Let slowly boil for six minutes, lift up with a skimmer, drain on a cloth and dress on a hot, deep dish. Place three tablespoons bread crumbs and one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, toss on fire until a nice light brown colour, then pour over the gnocchis and serve.
A scalded flour-and-egg paste poached in water and finished with browned crumbs — closer to a French pâte à choux dumpling than to potato gnocchi. Two details decide whether it works: the paste must be worked hot and fast, and the poaching water must never be at a rolling boil.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of milk is 1 1/2 cups and half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, which puts the cayenne at 1/4 teaspoon and the nutmeg at about 1/8.
- The liquid-to-flour ratio is lowA pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups, and 1 3/4 cups of liquid (less what boils away in ten minutes) will not hydrate it into a workable paste. Expect to add hot milk or water by the spoonful until you have a thick, glossy dough that holds a shape on the spoon. The original measurement, taken literally, gives a dry crumb rather than a batter.
- Work it hotThe boiled milk and wine must go into the flour while still near boiling and be beaten immediately; that is what gelatinises the starch and lets the dough hold the eggs. If it cools first the eggs will thin it into a slurry and the dumplings will disintegrate in the water.
- Eggs one at a timeThe staged additions — whole egg, then two yolks, with two minutes of beating between — are not fussiness. Each addition has to be fully absorbed before the next or the paste breaks. Let the dough cool to warm rather than hot before the first egg goes in.
- "Let slowly boil"The recipe does start from boiling water, but 'slowly boil' here is best read as a gentle simmer, with the surface barely moving; a hard rolling boil tears these dumplings apart. Six minutes is right for teaspoon-sized pieces; test one by cutting it open before committing the batch.
- Poach in batchesThe instruction to work as rapidly as possible assumes a large pot and a hot fire. In a domestic pan, drop no more than a dozen at a time so the water temperature does not collapse and the dumplings do not stick to each other.
- The crumb finishFresh crumbs, not dried packaged ones, tossed in butter over medium heat until light brown — a minute or two. They pass from brown to burnt quickly, and they should go over the gnocchi at the last second so they stay crisp.
- YieldA pound of flour makes a great deal; probably six to eight first-course servings, though the recipe gives no figure. Halve the quantities for a household of two or three, since these are best eaten straight from the pot.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its pages reflect the grand-hotel repertoire of the turn of the century rather than any single national tradition. That is why this dish is Italian in name and French in method: it is a choux-type paste — scalded liquid, flour, eggs beaten in one by one — poached and sauced, of the same family as gnocchi alla parigina and the Alsatian and Viennese flour dumplings, and quite unrelated to the potato gnocchi most cooks now assume. The buttered browned crumbs poured over at the end are the finish generally known as à la polonaise. It is safer to read the name as a house label than as a claim about geography.