gnoc­chi, my would-be Waterloo

Well, I can­not pro­fess to have a recipe for gnoc­chi, although I suc­cess­fully made gnoc­chi this evening. How to explain this conun­drum? It’s a very flex­i­ble dish. Let me explain.

My dear friend Char­lie, our house­guest this week­end, gave me a lov­ingly and extrav­a­gantly inscribed copy of Anto­nio Carluccio’s Sim­ple Cook­ing. In his over 50 years of cook­ing, it’s no sur­prise he can come up with a rather slim and gor­geously pho­tographed book of sim­ple tips, easy recipes, pantry advice, you name it. It’s a book you may have bought by many other peo­ple, many other times. Mar­cella Hazan? Guil­iano Hazan? Jamie Oliver, even, or in Amer­ica, Mario Batali or Giada di Lau­ren­tiis. Basic instruc­tions, things you would think I could follow.

Except that I sim­ply can­not fol­low a recipe. Unless I’m REALLY scared. And for some rea­son, because gnoc­chi was Ital­ian, I wasn’t scared. Enough.

So I thought, triple the spinach, why not? I love spinach. I’ll tell you why not. Because spinach adds, more even than fla­vor, LIQ­UID to a recipe. And if you’re mak­ing pasta, liq­uid mat­ters. Sigh.

I found myself hav­ing reli­giously fol­lowed the pro­por­tions of the other ingre­di­ents: flour, egg and mashed potato. So reli­giously that I dragged John out of the house to the hard­ware store to buy bat­ter­ies for my scale. And then, what did I do? I sim­ply flung spinach at the recipe as though it were being rationed. And the dough, my dears? Too, too sticky for words. Too sticky to live! What was a girl to do?

I had already clev­erly taken the left­over mashed potato (after its reli­gious weigh­ing) and turned it into proper mashed pota­toes, as with but­ter and cream. Well, I felt I should fling it in, to make up for the incred­i­ble amount of extra flour I knew was com­ing. And it WAS. A cou­ple of abortive technology-failed transat­lantic phone calls to my Ital­ian mother in law (with the brief inter­ven­tion of my annoyed hus­band: “why can’t you just fol­low a recipe, and no I will NOT be the trans­la­tor on this phone call because you’re cov­ered in flour!”) elicited the brief and wise advice, “Sift in some flour, very gen­tly and work it in.” Leav­ing aside the fact that I do not own a sifter, I drifted in some flour. And some more and some MORE. Finally I rolled the lit­tle dev­ils out and placed them upon plat­ters where… they STUCK. Like grim death.

Din­ner time arrived. “The tomato sauce smells ter­rific,” John said, and I thought, peo­ple have existed on less. I wrested the lit­tle blobs of green gnoc­chi from their plat­ters and sim­ply threw them in the boil­ing water. Sure enough, they blobbed to the top just as Anto­nio told me they would. I scooped them out, added a bit of the pasta water to thin the tomato sauce, topped them with moz­zarella cubes, a scat­ter­ing of chif­fon­ade of basil, and some parme­san, and…

DIVINE.

What on earth happened?

Light, fluffy (remind­ing me of Charlie’s nick­name for Avery, “part-time fluffy”), coated in per­fectly gar­licky tomato sauce. A rev­e­la­tion. What happened?

A very, very for­giv­ing recipe, is all I can say. The next time I try it, I promise — hand on heart — to fol­low the instruc­tions STRICTLY and report a real recipe. But my imme­di­ate advice would be: find a con­ge­nial recipe, change what­ever you like, and… fly by the seat of your pants.

So tonight we ate, hearts on our lips, and enjoyed a gor­geous salad to fol­low of an Ital­ian air-and spice-cured beef, with rocket, chilli oil, lemon juice and pep­per. Just bril­liant. And here I’d pic­tured family-wide scram­bled eggs at 9 p.m.

The les­son? None at all, except be grate­ful you have a fam­ily who will sit down to Lord knows what, and that there is a cui­sine like Ital­ian which pro­fesses to have recipes, but can accom­mo­date any num­ber of stu­pid errors. And for fresh-grated parme­san, which makes EVERY­THING all right.

Also, my din­ner was proof that if you have a lit­tle rocket, a lit­tle pre­served meat, and a good oil, you have a salad. In this coun­try, it’s sur­pris­ingly easy to accom­plish. Peo­ple may moan about pack­ag­ing (so much plas­tic, and yes it’s true), or so many air miles (Ital­ian meat, I know). But that aside, my con­science aside, it’s sin­fully sim­ple here in Eng­land to buy gor­geous Ital­ian cured meats, fab­u­lous buf­falo moz­zarella, bit­ingly sharp rocket, aged Parme­san, and with a lit­tle spicy olive or truf­fle oil, you have a salad. Such was our expe­ri­ence at din­ner at my friend Sally’s last week.

The lady has no fewer than four chil­dren, and a work­ing lad for a hus­band, tired out from the city. You’d never know it at their house: can­dles glow­ing, art with a very def­i­nite sen­si­bil­ity on the walls, two of their girls con­coct­ing Sally’s salad as we arrived. Figs! Pro­sciutto! Rocket, spinach, moz­zarella, bal­samic vine­gar. Quite perfect.

And this week­end, reunit­ing Avery’s friend Sylvie with her fam­ily, and intro­duc­ing Char­lie to them all, at La Fro­magerie. Quite sim­ply the most CHARM­ING of all com­mu­nal tables, in the heart of Maryle­bone, attached to the cheese-mongery but ris­ing far above such lim­i­ta­tions to offer a char­cu­terie plate to Sylvie’s brother of aston­ish­ing pro­por­tions: chorizo, salami, saucis­son sec, you name it, all sur­rounded by cor­ni­chons and cen­tered with an amaz­ing cele­riac slaw. Avery had a tomato tart, John and Char­lie a mush­room tart, I a fish plat­ter with smoked mack­erel AND smoked trout pates, smoked salmon, and fresh tara­masalata. Simon ordered the cheese plat­ter for us all to share. A friendly din, a happy shar­ing men­tal­ity, and adjoin­ing us, a Swedish fel­low about to go back there, and deter­mined to pay his entire bill in Eng­lish COINS! Labo­ri­ously piled in stacks per denom­i­na­tion! Some­how the lovely French wait­ress found this charm­ing, and did not bring out a pis­tol to shoot him in his Scan­di­na­vian knees.

Finally, off we went, part­ing from Char­lie (sob) and Sylvie’s fam­ily, to col­lect our… NEW CAR! Min­now, she’s been chris­tened, pearly gray as she is. TINY, sim­ply tiny. We tooled off in the after­noon sun, filled with sad mem­o­ries of Emmy, the beloved Mini, but ready to start a new era with the Cinque­cento. And in that Ital­ian frame of mind… gnoc­chi, as well. Sante!