Potato gnocchi is another Italian dish that became very popular abroad, thanks to the ease of preparing it, easy to find ingredients like flour and “international” potatoes, and its adaptability to any type of dressing.
The Simplest Form of Pasta
We can say that gnocchi is the first type of manmade pasta, considering its origins involved making a simple mixture of flour and water that was cut into small pieces of irregular shapes and eaten in small bites.
In a village on stilts dating from the Bronze Age discovered by archaeologists in the Trentino Alto Adige region, a few small pieces of dough like gnocchi and made from the flour of different milled grains were found in a hut on the water.
Different Names and Ingredients
There is also a pasta comparable to gnocchi called “zanzarielli,” which was served on the tables of the Court of Sforza, who for over a century were the rulers of Milan.
It was served on special occasions, such as a wedding ceremony or a celebration of a victory in battle, or even the welcoming of distinguished guests. But the ingredients were very different and more elaborate: bread crumbs, chopped almonds, spinach, milk and cheese, all of which the Sforza themselves produced on their farms to the South of Milan. They were cooked in boiling water, so the spinach in the dough made the broth golden which of course represented wealth.
In the seventeenth century, gnocchi were called “malfatti,” literally ‘misdeeds’, because the small pieces of dough were separated by hand and were never all the same or uniform. Water, eggs, and flour took the place of bread, milk, and chopped almonds.
All these ingredients disappeared when the first potatoes arrived in Italy in the 1600s, brought by the friars of the Discalced Carmelites, a religious order that was born in Spain, in late 1500s. The Spanish had imported the potato from Chile in those years and for the first time to Europe. Potatoes became widespread and the protagonist of every family’s daily diet, since they could then be grown anywhere, even on difficult terrain. The potato thereby joined the flour, giving us the dough used even today for gnocchi, which are topped with hearty sauces, often meat based.
Gnocchi in Rome Were Eaten on Thursdays
In Rome, there is still a very popular phrase that says: “Thursday, gnocchi, fish on Friday, Saturday tripe.” Tradition has it that on Thursday a hearty meal, precisely like gnocchi, was eaten so as not to suffer much from the lack of meat that certain rules of the Catholic religion imposed for the next day. But in other regions it was customary to eat gnocchi on different days. In the South, for example, on Sundays. In the then-less-Catholic north, however, precisely on Friday.
The Right Wine
Light white wines, not overly perfumed, but also rosé wines from Sicily, Puglia, or Lake Garda, such as Chiaretto and Bardolino. Lake Garda is surrounded by three regions—Lombardy, Veneto, and Trentino Alto Adige—and all produce excellent wines.
