AT HOME: Potato Gnocchi
Grandma taught me how it's done
By Loraine Page
COLUMNIST
I grew up in a four-family apartment building in New York City, in one of those Italian neighborhoods that also featured a smattering of Irish folks.
My grandmother was typical of the Italian women I’d sometimes see sitting in her kitchen having coffee and cake with her — heavyset, no English, widowed early.
I went downstairs to visit her often. We lived in the second-floor back apartment. Hers faced the front, with a view of the comings and goings on our small street.
I loved exploring things during my visits. She was clean and orderly, a different environment from the one upstairs, where my mother struggled to keep house while keeping an eye on my two younger brothers who were prone to throwing themselves off the furniture.
My grandmother had hat boxes, neatly stacked in a parlor closet. That was the first thing I did. I’d open them like I had no idea what was inside. Maybe they contained hats, but maybe they didn’t.
On really lucky visits, I could explore while grabbing a cookie or two that she’d just baked. To cool off, she’d arrange them atop her hope chest in the bedroom. Now we call these Italian Lemon Drop Cookies, but she just called them her cookies. In Italian, of course.
But discovering what was in my grandmother’s closet, pantry, or even the mysterious hope chest, paled in comparison to watching her make gnocchi (pronounced nyo-key).
I’d sidle up to her at the kitchen counter where she’d set up her large wooden dough board and gotten out the rolling pin, which had seen a lot of action.
We wouldn’t speak. This was not one of those times where she’d begin chatting to me in Italian and I’d interrupt and tell her I don’t know Italian, and then we’d both giggle because it happened all the time.
I’d watch, intently. I can’t, to this day, replicate what she did — the woman was a whiz at gnocchi-making, but I have pictures in my mind that paint the general idea.
I see concentric circles. There is the flour circle and around that the riced potato circle. In the center sits a single raw egg. My grandmother uses a fork and brings these ingredients together, forming a large ball of dough.
The ball of dough (magically) becomes snakes of dough, and with her hands she’s rolling these snakes. Rolling them and rolling them until they become skinny but not too skinny.
She’s now deftly cutting the skinny rolls of dough, creating individual gnocchi dumplings with each whack of her knife. She’s whacking so fast and so hard, the gnocchi appear to be flying off the board.
She gathers them up and quickly plops them into the waiting pot of boiling water. When they rise to the top (it happens rather quickly), she scoops them up and onto a large serving platter.
Lunch is served, for just the two of us. She spoons homemade tomato sauce (she grows the tomatoes in the backyard garden and cans her own sauce) over my gnocchi and then grates Romano cheese for me.
Delicious. I can honestly say I have never tasted better gnocchi anywhere. My mother tried but lacked the time it takes to perfect the process. Any glitch in the making of gnocchi, or the purchase of the wrong kind of potatoes (Russet are best) can cause them to either fall apart in the boiling water or turn out too rubbery.
I have never tried. I am more an admirer of what my talented grandmother could do. Also, I am a granddaughter who is ever-so-grateful for the time she took to include me in her long life. How lucky I was to live only one staircase away from her.
I do search for great gnocchi, though. I try them in restaurants that serve them, taking care they are made with potatoes. Some are not. I try the ones I see in supermarkets, too. I’m looking for the taste and the texture — texture is key with gnocchi — that is at least similar to the gnocchi my grandmother used to make.
If you are going to make your own, I would really advise using baking potatoes — Russet or Idaho — since they have the best chance of containing the right amount of starch. And invest in a potato ricer. They still make them.
While writing this, I found a recipe online that’s not exactly how my grandmother made hers but it’s pretty close.
The photos used with the recipe don’t look like my grandmother’s in that she didn’t apply the fork indentation designs that are popular today, and she strictly used tomato sauce rather than basil pesto.
The title of the page with the recipe is “How to Make Gnocchi like an Italian Grandmother.” To which I would add, “It's the only way to make it.”
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