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Milk Gnocchi
(Gnocchi di latte) One quart of milk.
Sugar, nine ounces.
Starch in powder, four ounces.
Eight yolks of eggs.
A taste of vanilla.
Mix everything together as you would do for a cream and put on the fire in a saucepan, continually stirring with a ladle. When the mixture has become hard keep it a few moments more on the fire and then pour it in a plate to make it about half an inch thick and cut it into diamonds when it is cold. Put these diamonds one over the other with symmetry in a baking tin or in a fireproof glass plate, with some little pieces of butter in between and brown them a little in the oven.
Serve hot. 208
A stovetop pastry cream stiff enough to cut, then layered with butter and browned — closer to a fried-custard or crema fritta than to potato gnocchi. The hinge is cooking the starch out fully before you spread it.
- Weights to volumesNine ounces sugar is about 1¼ cups; four ounces starch is roughly a cup of cornstarch, or about ¾ cup of the denser potato starch. One quart of milk is 4 cups. Weighing the starch is worth the trouble, since a heavy cup will make the slab chalky.
- What "starch in powder" meansNot flour. Recipes of this kind call for amido, a refined starch — potato, corn, rice or wheat starch — which sets to a clean, sliceable gel. Wheat flour will give a pasty, floury texture instead.
- Cook it longer than looks necessaryThe instruction to "keep it a few moments more on the fire" after it thickens is the important one. Starch that has not been held at a bubble tastes raw and weeps liquid as the slab cools, so keep stirring over heat for a minute or two past the point where the ladle leaves a track.
- Protecting the yolksThe original mixes everything cold and heats it together, which works if you stir constantly over moderate heat. If your pan runs hot, whisk the starch and sugar with the yolks, warm the milk separately, then temper it in — the result is identical and there is less risk of scrambled specks.
- Setting and cuttingSpread on a buttered plate or shallow tray to half an inch, press plastic wrap to the surface to stop a skin forming, and refrigerate two hours or more. Cold from the refrigerator it cuts into clean diamonds; at room temperature it drags.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven, around 425F, for 8 to 10 minutes will melt the butter and colour the tops without slumping the diamonds; a few minutes under the broiler does the same faster. Longer, gentler baking softens them into a pudding.
- Vanilla"A taste of vanilla" could mean a piece of split bean steeped in the milk or a commercial extract, both available in this period. A teaspoon or two of extract, stirred in off the heat, is the practical substitute.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes a large slab — several dozen diamonds, depending on how big you cut them, enough for six to eight. Serve straight from the dish while the butter is still bubbling; they are best warm and go dense once fully cold.
Gnocchi di latte belongs to a family of Italian sweets built on a stiff milk-and-starch custard that is set, cut and then fried or browned — the same idea as crema fritta in Emilia-Romagna and latte dolce fritto, which is strongly associated with Liguria and the north-west. The word gnocchi here describes only the shape and the way the pieces are cut from a slab, not the potato dumpling most English speakers now assume; the term has always been loose in Italian, covering anything small and lumpish. Recipes of this type circulated widely in nineteenth-century Italian domestic cookery, notably in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina, with its numbered format and household tone. The reliance on cornstarch or potato starch rather than flour is characteristic of the type, giving smooth, glossy creams.