The gnocchi maker

His history

In Italy, gnocchi are so popular that they have made a foray into everyday language. “Ridi, ridi, che la mamma ha fatto gli gnocchi!” ” (“Laugh, laugh, this mother made gnocchi!”), We say when faced with someone in the throes of giggles. A reference to the simple joy felt by a child when he sees arriving on the table a plate filled with these famous little golden balls.

From north to south of La Botte – and as far as Nice, where they are one of the flagship specialties of local cuisine – gnocchi go well with all sauces. Depending on the region, they can be made from corn or wheat flour, or even made from breadcrumbs or stale bread, as in Trentino and Lombardy. To shape them and to mark them with those characteristic little grooves that help retain the sauce when tasting, Bartolomeo Scappi, a great Italian cook of the Renaissance, recommends rolling them on the back of a cheese grater.

At the same time, in Sardinia, the back of a wicker basket is traditionally used. Since the great famine episodes that hit Italy in the 18th century^e century – and forced farmers to diversify their sources of food – gnocchi are more commonly made with mashed potatoes. We then invent the rigagnocchi (literally, “raye-gnocchi”), more practical and more manageable: a small plank in beech or oak wood about twenty centimeters long, enhanced with a handle and dotted with about thirty perfectly parallel stripes .

Its use

In his small apartment at 5^e arrondissement of Paris, Ilaria Brunetti has made a habit of preparing her gnocchi directly on the living room table. On a large floured wooden board, she places in front of her a block of gnocchi dough (one kilo of warm potato flesh combined with an egg and 250 grams of flour) that she divides into four equal parts.

For the food journalist from Friuli, co-author ofWe are going to taste Italy (Marabout, 2020, 463 pages devoted to Italian culinary heritage), the molding of gnocchi always represents a special moment: “It’s a ritual that reminds me of my childhood, and the hours spent hanging out in my grandmother’s kitchen. The gnocchi dough is very flexible; it is a tactile and manual work which appeals to the feeling. ”

With her hands laid out flat and side by side, she delicately spreads a section and forms a roll of dough about 30 centimeters long and two centimeters thick that she cuts and then details into about fifteen small rectangular and uniform gnocchi. . It only remains for him, then, to make them descend the slope of the rigagnocchi “, tilted at 45 degrees, exerting slight pressure with the thumb, from the inside to the outside. Here are the gnocchi adorned with their zebra stripes which will finish their race poached in water, then returned to a pan over very low heat with olive oil, a clove of garlic, sage, a handful of chanterelles and a touch of butter.