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Raviol
(Italian forcemeat balls.) These are used in soups, to garnish roasts or entrees or as a separate course. Chop some lamb or chicken very fine, add to every 2 ounces, 1 ounce of bread-crumbs, 1 ounce grated ham, 1 onion, grated, yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, mashed with a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan cheese. Add, mixing well, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and the yolk of an egg. Roll out some good puff paste very thin, cut into rounds, fill with a spoonful of this, pressing 2 pieces together. Poach them in boiling stock and serve on a bed of asparagus or spinach.
An Edwardian English reading of ravioli, treated as a forcemeat dumpling rather than a pasta. The proportions are given by weight in a running ratio, which is the first thing to sort out.
- Reading the ratioThe formula is per 2 oz of chopped meat: 1 oz breadcrumbs, 1 oz grated ham, 1 grated onion, and 2 hard-boiled yolks. Scale it up on that basis: 8 oz of cooked lamb or chicken with 4 oz crumbs and 4 oz ham. The single raw yolk is most likely meant to bind the whole batch rather than each 2 oz, though the wording is ambiguous.
- One onion is too muchA whole grated onion per 2 oz of meat is out of proportion by modern taste and leaves the filling wet and raw-tasting. Use a couple of tablespoons of finely grated onion softened in butter first, and squeeze out the liquid before mixing.
- Cooked meat, not rawThe grated ham and hard yolks suggest a filling built from already-cooked meat, as leftover roast lamb or boiled fowl. Raw minced chicken will not cook through reliably in a brief poach inside pastry.
- Puff paste is the period choiceRolled thin, puff paste behaves as a soft dumpling wrapper in stock rather than puffing. A plain pasta dough of flour, egg and a little water is closer to what Italian kitchens used then and now, and holds its seal better.
- SealingBrush the rim of each round with water or egg white, mound the filling in the centre, lay a second round over and press out all air from the middle outward. Trapped air lifts the seam apart in the pan.
- Poaching timeKeep the stock at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, or the seams burst. Pasta-wrapped ravioli need 3 to 4 minutes from the point they float; puff paste wants 5 to 6. Lift with a slotted spoon and drain briefly.
- Grated ParmesanA tablespoon of Parmesan per 2 oz of meat is a seasoning, not a bulk ingredient. Use a hard aged cheese grated fine; pre-grated shelf-stable powder will taste flat against the nutmeg and ham.
- Yield and serviceThe base quantity makes 8 to 10 small ravioli, enough for a garnish or a soup for two. As a separate course on spinach or asparagus, count 6 to 8 per person and moisten with a ladle of the poaching stock.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a small genre of turn-of-the-century American and English books that collected dishes noted while travelling, and the spelling "Raviol" is a sign of that second-hand transmission: the Italian plural ravioli has been reshaped into an English singular. The description is also revealing about how ravioli were understood outside Italy at the time. Wrapped in puff paste and offered as a soup garnish or a bed-of-spinach entree, the dish is being read as a kind of forcemeat quenelle rather than as pasta, and the filling of chopped roast meat, ham, breadcrumbs and hard yolks is closer to an English stuffing than to a Genoese or Emilian one. Ravioli of this general shape are documented in Italian cooking well before the nineteenth century, but the pattern here, using up cooked meat from a previous roast, reflects the ordinary economy of a household kitchen more than any regional tradition.