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Ravioli
Remove the stalks and thoroughly wash a pint fresh spinach, plunge in a quart boiling water with a half teaspoon salt, and boil for eight minutes. Thoroughly drain on a sieve, and finely chop them; place them in a bowl, adding one ounce very finely chopped, cooked, lean ham. Season with two saltspoons salt, two saltspoons white pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg and one tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese; mix well for a minute, and keep in a cool place until required.
Sift quarter of a pound of flour on a table, make a fountain in the centre, place in two egg yolks, three tablespoons water and a saltspoon salt. Knead the whole well for ten minutes, then let rest for five minutes. Roll out the paste on a lightly floured table, as thin as possible, and with a round pastry cutter the size of a silver dollar stamp out as many as you can. Arrange a teaspoon of the spinach preparation in the centre of one piece, lightly wet the edges with cold water and cover it with another round of paste, then carefully press both edges together to tightly close them. Proceed the same with the rest. When all are finished carefully drop them in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt and cook for twenty minutes. Take up with a skimmer, thoroughly drain and use as required.
A straightforward spinach-and-ham ravioli, with one instruction that modern cooks should ignore outright: the twenty-minute boil.
- Cook them for minutes, not twentyFresh pasta rolled "as thin as possible" is done in about 3 to 4 minutes, and the filling is already cooked. Twenty minutes in boiling water risks bursting the seams.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the filling takes 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon white pepper and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, and the dough 1/4 teaspoon salt. The pepper is assertive at that level; scale back if you prefer.
- A pint of spinachThis is a volume measure of raw leaves and is genuinely vague — a pint of loosely packed spinach is only a few ounces, and eight ounces of modern bagged spinach is closer to the mark for the quantity of filling described. Buy more than you think you need.
- Squeeze it dry"Thoroughly drain on a sieve" is not enough. Wring the cooked spinach in a towel until it stops giving up water, or the filling will wet the pasta from the inside and the seals will fail.
- The doughQuarter pound of flour is about 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons; two yolks and three tablespoons water is a fairly wet dough by modern standards. Add the water gradually and hold some back. Five minutes' rest is the minimum — 30 minutes wrapped, at room temperature, makes the dough far easier to roll thin.
- A silver dollarRoughly 1 1/2 inches across. A 1 1/2 to 2 inch round cutter gives ravioli that take about a teaspoon of filling, as specified.
- "Use as required"The period shorthand for finishing at the stove: tossed in melted butter with grated Parmesan, dropped into clear broth, or napped with tomato sauce. Drain well and dress immediately.
- YieldPerhaps two dozen or so small ravioli, though the number depends entirely on how thin the paste is rolled and how much is lost in trimmings.
Ravioli appear in Italian records long before they reached American cookbooks; filled pasta of this kind is generally traced to the medieval kitchens of northern and central Italy, and a spinach-and-cheese stuffing bound with egg and scented with nutmeg is one of the oldest and most durable versions of it. The ham here is a small, thrifty flavouring rather than a main ingredient, in the manner of a filling built from leftovers. The writer is plainly addressing readers who could not be assumed to know what ravioli were, specifying the cutter by comparison to a silver dollar and giving every step of a technique an Italian cook would have learned by watching.