Random Recipe Adventure, Week 8

2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.

WEEK 8

The book

The Food of Italy by Claudia Roden

How/where/when did I get it?

A long time ago in a lifetime far far removed from this one.

Have I used it since then?

To judge by the spladges of tomato sauce on page 132, yes.

What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?

Gnocchi di patata

So, what about it?

Here’s a haiku based on my experience with this book:

Oh dear. Oh dear dear.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear dear.
Those bloody gnocchi.

We’ve all had them. Vacuum-packed blobs of stodge which we think are a good idea for a winter supper, but which all too often leave us disappointed.

Well let me tell you, the very worst factory-produced gnocchi you’ve ever eaten were nothing compared to the catastrophically leaden specimens I prepared last night. For this culinary clusterfuck I am laying the blame 80% at Ms Roden’s door.

Let’s examine.

I’ve made gnocchi before – often enough to be aware of the dangers, but nothing like often enough to be confident of tackling them without an expert guiding hand. So I swore I would follow the recipe to the letter, and not succumb to the tempting supposition that ‘Oh yes, I know how it goes from here. It’ll be fine.’

Roden tells us that ‘baking, not boiling the potatoes results in perfect gnocchi which never fail.’ Bold words, and ones I can instantly refute.

First things first: quantities.
800g (1 ½ lb) baked potatoes, weighed skinned
Ok, so 800g isn’t 1½ lb. It’s 1¾. A big difference.
Salt
2 egg yolks
100g (3½ oz) plain flour.
This conversion is fine, so it’s not that she’s adjusted the amounts for the imperial measurements. She’s just got it wrong, with the result that you’re going to get different results depending on which measuring system you use. Grrr.

Also, and I’m not just being difficult, those 800g of potato represent the cooked weight, so you’re left to guess how much uncooked potato is going to yield the right amount.

NO. NO NO NO.

You had one job: tell me how to cook these things. Don’t make me guess.

I guessed. Wrongly, as it turned out. I was left with 650g of cooked potato.

What I should have done at this stage: use just one egg yolk and not all the potato, then add the flour sparingly until the dough reached the right consistency, accepting at the same time that we wouldn’t have enough, and make a bacon sarnie as a ‘main course’.

Or I could have just sent out for pizza.

Easy to say that now.

I’ll spare you the gory details of the desperate farrago that ensued. Just a couple of bare facts should suffice:

1. Gnocchi dough goes from ‘too sticky to work properly’ to ‘WAY TOO MUCH FLOUR THEY’RE GOING TO BE POINTLESS LUMPEN DOUGH-BULLETS’ really quickly.

2. A tub of butter and two metric fucktons of parmesan and gorgonzola aren’t enough to compensate for the miserable experience of chewing your way through a plate of the aforementioned pointless lumpen dough-bullets.

Now look, I’m not saying I wasn’t at least partly to blame. But Ms Roden threw me a curve ball from the outset, so I’m sending her a glowering look while scraping gnocchi dough from the walls.

The rest of the book…I remember cooking from it with some pleasure, back in the day. But then I discovered Marcella Hazan, and The Food of Italy has languished. Nothing I found in it on this cursory revisit was enough to change my mind. Maybe I’m just too traumatised by the gnocchi experience.

The Verdict: Keeper or chucker.

Well what do you think? Anyone want it?

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