Gnocchi
This is an excellent soup, but as it requires boiled or roast breast of chicken or turkey it is well to make it only when these ingredients are handy.
Prepare a certain quantity of boiled potatoes, the mealy kind being preferred. Mash the potatoes and mix them with chicken or turkey breast well ground, grated cheese (Parmesan or Swiss), two or more yolks of eggs, salt and a small quantity of nutmeg. Pour the compound on the bread board with a quantity of flour sufficient to make a paste and roll it in little sticks as thick as the small finger. Cut the sticks in little pieces about half an inch long and put them in boiling water. Five or six minutes' cooking will be sufficient. 5
The book gives no quantities at all, which is normal for gnocchi in Italian domestic writing of this period — the proportions follow from how wet the potatoes are. A workable starting point and a few cautions follow.
- Working proportionsFor four servings: about 1 lb (450 g) potatoes, 4 oz (115 g) finely ground cooked chicken or turkey breast, 2 oz (55 g) grated Parmesan, 2 egg yolks, and roughly 4-5 oz (115-140 g) flour, added a handful at a time until the dough just stops sticking. Stop adding flour the moment it holds together; more flour means heavier gnocchi.
- "Mealy" potatoesThis means a floury, low-moisture variety — russet or King Edward, not a waxy salad potato. Bake them or boil them whole in their skins and peel while hot, so they absorb as little water as possible.
- Rice, do not mashA potato ricer or food mill run over hot potatoes gives a dry, fluffy texture. A masher leaves lumps and a food processor turns the starch to glue.
- Grind the meat properly"Well ground" means a fine paste, not a mince — leftover roast breast pulsed in a processor with a little of the potato, or passed twice through a meat grinder. Coarse shreds tear the dough as you roll it.
- Boiling water, then not quiteDrop the pieces into water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which knocks them apart. Five to six minutes is right for half-inch pieces; most will float within two or three minutes and need a little longer to cook through the centre.
- It is a soupThe author opens by calling this 'an excellent soup', though the instructions stop at boiling the pieces in water and say nothing about how they are served. The obvious reading is that the cooked gnocchi go into a chicken or turkey broth rather than a sauce, but the book does not say so.
- Test one firstPoach a single gnocco before shaping the rest. If it disintegrates, work in another spoonful of flour; if it is dense and rubbery, the dough already has too much.
- The trailing "5"The stray numeral at the end is almost certainly a printing artefact of the book's numbering rather than a quantity or a timing.
Gnocchi made from potato are younger than the name suggests: gnocchi (from a word often said to mean a knot or knuckle in wood, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled) originally covered small dumplings of bread, semolina or flour, and the potato version only became common in Italy in the nineteenth century. This version, enriched with pounded breast meat and cheese, belongs to the older tradition of the dumpling served in brodo rather than the sauced dish familiar today, and it is frankly a leftovers recipe oroast or boiled poultry is already in the house. Such economies present a frugal habit as a delicacy, which in this case it genuinely is.