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Ravioli
(Another recipe.) Chop 1/4 pound of veal very fine, add 2 ounces of sausage meat, 2 ounces butter, 1 ounce beef marrow, 1 teaspoonful of mixed herbs, salt, pepper, 1 cup of spinach, cooked, drained, and chopped fine, with 1/4 pound of grated cheese, 2 eggs well beaten. Stir well, form into balls, lay them on a dish, dust thickly with grated cheese, and bake until brown. Serve with a sauce.
Despite the title, no pasta is involved: this is a baked forcemeat ball in the ravioli nudi or gnudi tradition, and the filling is the whole dish. A few of the ingredients and all of the oven guidance need filling in.
- The hinge: get the mixture cold and firmTwo eggs, soft butter and marrow make a slack mass that will slump into puddles on the dish. Mix, then chill at least an hour before forming the balls, and keep them no larger than a walnut so they cook through before the outside dries.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot oven, 400-425F, browns the cheese crust in about 20-25 minutes for walnut-sized balls. Veal and pork forcemeat should reach 160F at the centre.
- Beef marrowAsk a butcher for split marrow bones and scoop the raw marrow out, or order it cut. If you cannot get it, an extra ounce of butter plus a little finely chopped pork fat gives a comparable richness, though not the same silkiness.
- Sausage meatIn American and English use of the period this generally meant plain bulk pork sausage, seasoned with little more than salt, pepper and sage. Use uncased breakfast sausage or ground pork with a pinch of sage; Italian sausage with fennel and chilli will dominate the veal.
- "Mixed herbs"Usually a dried blend; period lists often included thyme, marjoram, savory or parsley, though the book does not specify. A teaspoon of dried mixed herbs is a lot for a mixture of this size; start with half and taste a fried scrap of the raw mix before shaping the rest.
- The cheeseA quarter pound grated for the mixture and more for dusting suggests Parmesan, or Parmesan cut with a little dry pecorino, though the book does not say. Weigh rather than measure by volume: 4 oz is roughly 1 1/3 cups grated fine.
- SpinachOne cup cooked, drained and chopped is about 10 oz raw, or a 10 oz block of frozen leaf spinach. Squeeze it hard in a towel; residual water is the usual reason these balls fall apart.
- The sauceThe book leaves it open. A plain tomato sauce or a light brown gravy both suit; so does melted butter with more grated cheese, which is the usual dressing for gnudi.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 small balls, enough for three or four as a first course or a light supper with bread and salad.
Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) gathered dishes from European and colonial kitchens for American cooks, and its Italian entries show how loosely the vocabulary had travelled. A seasoned forcemeat of veal, spinach and cheese could be called ravioli even when baked bare on a dish. The dish this actually resembles is the Tuscan gnudi or ravioli nudi, "naked ravioli" — characteristically a ricotta-and-greens stuffing cooked without pasta, generally traced to Tuscan home cooking. The beef marrow is the period's signature: it appears in nineteenth-century forcemeats as a cheap source of unctuousness that butter alone could not supply, and its near-disappearance from home cooking is often said to mark the distance between that era's larder and ours.