Ravioli

This month at Montengarde Cookery Group the theme is Eat Your Vegetables, so it’s time for some spinach ravioli.

I’ll let you in on a secret, although I love redacting recipes and cooking them my wife, HL Kayleigh de Leis, is the better cook, especially when it comes to pastas. So she’s the one making it this time.

This month’s is coming from Sabina Welserin’s 1553 German cookery book. Rabiolin zú machen or “to make ravioli”.

31 To make ravioli

Take spinach and blanch it as if you were making cooked spinach, and chop it small. Take approximately one handful, when it is chopped, cheese or meat from a chicken or capon that was boiled or roasted. Then take twice as much cheese as herb, or of chicken an equal amount, and beat two or three eggs into it and make a good dough, put salt and pepper into it and make a dough with good flour, as if you would make a tart, and when you have made little flat cakes of dough then put a small ball of filling on the edge of the flat cake and form it into a dumpling. And press it together well along the edges and place it in broth and let it cook about as long as for a soft-boiled egg. The meat should be finely chopped and the cheese finely grated.

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Classical Roman Pasta?

Note: A later version of this was published in Petits Propos Culinaires Issue 108, May 2017 p74-76 “The Lack of Evidence Regarding the Existence of Classical Roman Pasta”.

In some of my previous work I mentioned that Roman legions had pasta. This is a bit of a contentious subject and the traditional story is that pasta came to Europe via China, the other tradition is that it was introduced to Sicily by the Arabs in the 9th century. We had a discussion of this on the SCA Cooks Facebook page and so I looked into whether or not there was proof of pasta existing in Classical Rome and Greece.

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