Potato Gnocchi

History

Gnocchi are among Italy's oldest dumplings, and for centuries they were bound not with potato but with flour, bread or semolina. The name likely comes from *nocchio*, "a knot in wood," or *nocca*, "knuckle," for the little rounded shapes.

The potato reached Italy in the sixteenth century but entered gnocchi much later, and the sources vary widely on the pace — some placing potato versions as early as the seventeenth century, others tying their spread to the late nineteenth.

Artusi's potato gnocchi is a single recipe, and it is close to the dumpling we know now. He cooks the potatoes in water or, better, steam, skins them while they are scalding hot and passes them through a sieve, then works them with wheat flour — four hundred grams of potato to a hundred and fifty of flour. He is emphatic about that proportion, and tells a story against it: a lady who used too little flour put her spoon into the pot and found nothing there at all, the gnocchi having dissolved the moment they met the boiling water. The dough is rolled into a thin cylinder, cut into short lengths, and each piece hollowed with the thumb against the back of a grater — the same gesture the sixteenth-century cooks are said to have used.

An earlier version of this note credited Artusi with two potato recipes. He gives one; the neighbouring recipe is made with cornmeal. The named Renaissance and eighteenth-century cooks in the dish's earlier history, and the milling-fee explanation for its spread, we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 400 g potatoes
• 150 g wheat flour
• cheese
• butter
• tomato sauce
• milk

Instructions

1. Cook the potatoes (ideally steamed), peel while hot, and pass through a sieve.
2. Knead with the flour, roll into a thin cylinder, and cut into pieces about 3 cm long.
3. Dust with flour and hollow each with your thumb against the back of a grater.
4. Boil in salted water for 10 minutes; drain and dress with cheese, butter and tomato sauce, or cook in milk for a more delicate version.