Continuing to go through Fasting-Days recipes that would be used during the current season of Lent, I happened upon an interesting dish via a somewhat winding journey of research. Bills of fare or menus of dishes were commonly included in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookery texts; some of those were specifically for Fish or Fast Days, or the extended period of those days found in Lent. Robert May who wrote The Accomplist Cook (1660) makes his political (Royalist) and religious (High Anglican) views clear. It is therefore not surprising that he gives a prominent place in his book to "A Bill of Fare formerly used on Fasting Days and in Lent."
He is pining for the great meals that were served – even during Lent – under the reign of Charles I, who was executed a little over ten years before his book was published. In his bill of fare for the Fasting season, among the likes of “Lobsters,” “Souc't Turbut,” and “Stewed Oysters in Scollop Shells,” he includes the somewhat ambiguous – “Made dish of Spinage [Spinach]”. A “made dish” is generally just a dish with several important ingredients but looking for what exactly he means, I found a section in the book entitled “Divers made Dishes or Capilotados.” “Capilotado” does not have a ready translation but has some connection to Italy; there is a group of dishes in the section that begin with “Other made dishes, or little Pasties, called in Italian Tortelleti.” A couple recipes later is “Tortelleti, or little Pasties otherwayes, of Beets or Spinage chopped very small.” Having found a makeable made dish of spinach, I had my recipe for the week.
There is generally no pasta today called Tortelleti but tortellini is a common dish. Being a very amateur admirer of the Italian language, I bow to the more knowledgeable, but my understanding is that “-etto” (“-etti” in the plural) and “-ino” (“-ini”) are both endings that make the word mean something smaller. So, we are talking about a little “torte” or “torta” basically. “Torta” in Italian at that point could mean either cake or pie and contextually from May’s translation, and from an important Italian source, it seems obvious that tortelleti are tiny versions of the latter. The important source is Bartolomeo Scappi – an internationally famous sixteenth-century cook, who served the likes of cardinals and popes. I later found in my research that Scappi uses the term “Tortelletti” (with two “t”s) and, even later, I learned that May probably uses the term because he took pasta recipes – including the spinach one - from the Italian cook’s book: Opera (1570).
I will discuss more about the English cook’s adaption and Scappi’s original in my notes at the end, but after that winding introduction, I present my recipe for Tortelleti of Spinage with dough/paste/sort of pasta from another tortelleti recipe.
Recipe
“Tortelleti, or little Pasties otherways…of Spinage”
Ingredients
- One recipe of “Paste” from “Little Pasties, called in Italian Tortelleti.” (recipe below)
- 30g (about 2 tbsp) butter
- 227g spinach, washed and well dried if needed
- Sweet herbs (I used ¼ tsp dried parsley, 1/8 tsp dried mint, 1/8 tsp dried marjoram)
- 10g (about 2 tbsp) grated Parmesan cheese plus more for finishing
- Pinch of cinnamon plus more for finishing
- Pinch of cloves
- 1/8 tsp ground black pepper
- 20g currants
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- 15g grated stale bread or breadcrumbs, more as needed
- 900ml of chicken broth
- Sugar for finishing.
Instructions
Prepare pasta as per recipe below, wrap in plastic wrap and set aside.
In a large frying pan, over medium heat, melt butter and sauté spinach until broken down - about 4 minutes.
Allow to cool slightly and chop the cooked spinach fine.
Place spinach in a bowl and add the remaining ingredients except the broth, sugar, extra cheese, and extra cinnamon. Stir to combine. Set aside. You want your mixture fairly dry, if there is visible liquid, add more grated bread.
Take half your paste, leaving the other half covered. On a large, floured surface, roll the half out, as thin as possible with a rolling pin. (You could try a pasta machine, but I have never done so with a dough that includes butter.)
Prepare a small bowl of warm water and place beside your bowl of spinach mixture.
Using a 6cm (about 2.5”) cookie cutter or similar, cut a circle from the sheet of paste you have made.
Holding the circle in one hand, dip your finger in the bowl of water and wet the rim.
Spoon an amount of spinach onto the circle that will allow an edge of dough on all sides. Fold in half over the filling and squeeze the wetted edges together to form a seal. Fold any excess dough over, to reinforce the seal.
Put the raw tortelleti on a lightly floured plate or wax paper and repeat until you have used all the paste you can. Roll out the reserved half of the paste; cut and continue until you use up all your filling.
Allow to rest while you bring your broth to a boil in a medium pot over high heat
Working in a couple batches, cook your tortelleti in the broth for about 6 minutes.
Carefully remove tortelleti – this paste is softer than normal pasta – with a slotted spoon and keep warm. Repeat until all are cooked, reserving the broth.
Pour broth into bowls, add tortelleti and serve with extra cinnamon and Parmesan, as well as sugar, scattered over top.
“Paste” from “Little Pasties, called in Italian Tortelleti.”
Ingredients
- 150g flour
- ¼ tsp sugar
- 75g butter, cut into pieces
- 1 tbsp rosewater
- 3 tbsp boiling water
Instructions
In a large bowl, mix flour and sugar.
Place butter in another heatproof bowl.
To butter, add rosewater and then the boiling water.
Stir vigorously until the butter has melted a bit and creamed. It will look a bit like icing.
Make a well in the centre of your flour bowl and add the butter.
With a wooden spoon, move the butter around to slowly incorporate the flour. Continue to stir with the spoon and then work with your hands until a dough has formed.
Cover and set aside.
Notes
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| Frontispiece from a1678 edition of the Accomplist Cook held at the Bodleian Library |
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| The title page from the above mentioned copy |
First, I could not find an even semi-reasonable priced bit of saffron in time for inclusion in my dish; both Robert May’s recipe and Scappi’s version call for it. They are both writing for a very wealthy base readership but if you would like to include it, a pinch would do.
There are no quantities mentioned in May’s set of instructions, so my quantities are based on experience and taste. The English author merely says to “make your pasties” and so looking for a paste recipe, I found at least a set of ingredients in his first “Torteletti” recipe. There he says to “make a piece of paste of warm or boiling liquor, and some rose water, sugar, butter.” I chose to use these somewhat different ingredients and went with water as my “liquor.” I was somewhat vindicated in those choices when I started to compare Scappi’s earlier version, but more on that when I compare the two sets of instructions.
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| The first tortelleti recipe in The Accomplisht Cook, in which May includes a paste recipe. |
The proportions I used for the paste come from a basic hot water pastry recipe, which calls for four parts flour to two parts shortening to one part water. For that part water, I used 3 parts boiling water and 1 part rosewater, which I thought was plenty. The amount of sugar I used was probably low and I did not taste it at all, but I was concerned with the overall sweetness fighting the cheese. This is generally a strange dough for a boiled pasta/dumpling. It is a bit like perogies but softer and probably my least favourite part of the dish, especially after eating more than one or two.
My misgivings aside, it is the correct paste/pasta to use explicitly according to Bartolomeo Scappi, which leads into a general examination of his recipes and how they differ from Robert May’s adaptions. On the subject of the pasta, the famous Italian cook says in his corresponding recipe: “habbiasi un sfoglio di pasta fatta nel modo che si dice nel capitolo 177.” That is very broadly translated as: have a sheet of pasta made like it says in chapter 177. Chapter 177 is two recipes above – the recipe corresponding to where I got my paste ingredients in May’s book. In his version, Scappi writes that you have “uno sfoglio di pasta” made with “fior di farina, acqua di rose, sale, butiro, zuccaro, & acqua tepida” – flour, rosewater, salt, butter, sugar and warm water. May omits the salt and says to use either boiling (which I used) or warm water. The Scappi’s use of the word “butiro” for butter is notable; the general Italian word for butter is “burro,” which came to them from the Old French “burre.” “Butiro” is more directly descended from the Latin “butyrum,” which led to “burre” and eventually our English “butter.”
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| Scappi's "tortelletti con la polpa di cappone" which includes the ingredients for his pasta, highlighted above. |
Returning to differences between Scappi’s 1570 Tortelletti and May’s 1660 ones, we can begin with the title, half the main ingredient and the explicit composition of the dish. Scappi titles his instruction “Per far minestra di tortelletti d’herba alla Lombarda;” again roughly translated: To make Lombardy-style soup of herb tortelletti. Thus, you are probably meant to eat the pasta in the stock you cooked it in, though neither cook says this directly. While May says the pasta is made with beets (both cooks probably mean the greens) or spinach, Scappi says to use both.
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| Scappi's tortelletti which includes spinach |
The processes in the recipes are similar as they are relatively simple. You cook the greens in butter and add most of the rest of the ingredients – sweet herbs (“una brancata d'herbe odorifere”), pepper (“pepe”), cinnamon (“cannella”), cloves (“garofani”), saffron (“zafferano”) and raw egg (“uove crude”). One difference is there are raisins (“uva passa”) in the Italian dish while May calls for currants, which in another tortelletti, Scappi calls “uva passa di Corinto.” This is similar to one modern French name for currants – “raisins sec de corinthe.”
Scappi also calls for “cascio Parmeggiano grattato” – grated Parmesan cheese - like May but says you should include equal amounts of “cascio grasso.” Maybe he does not include it because he didn’t know, like me, exactly what is meant by this “fat cheese.” The inclusion of the “s” in “cascio,” has fallen away since this period but the modern spelling can be seen in the simple “cacio e pepe” – cheese and pepper – pasta sauce.
May’s last ingredient is grated bread while the Italian recipe says only to add it – “pan grattato” - if the “compsitione” is “troppo liquida” – too wet - and if it is too dry add “poco piu di butiro” – a little more butter. May gets creative with what he says you can boil your tortelleti in – broth, cream, milk or almond milk; Scappi just says to cook them in “buon brodo di carne” – good meat broth - which makes sense if you are thinking of this as a soup, as the Italian title says. The seemingly related phrase “thus you may do to any fish” is also May’s addition. Both end saying you serve the tortelleti with cheese, sugar, and cinnamon over the top, which leads to how this sixteenth and seventeenth century pasta tastes.
There is a lot of competing tastes and textures in these parcels, for a modern North American palate at least. The pasta is soft, as I mentioned, but the flavours, those that can be discerned, are fine and the butter is okay since the dish is not that rich overall. The filling has a number of background flavours and the Parmesan heightens things rather than being too forward. The currants provide a nice break in sweetness and texture. The cinnamon, sugar and Parmesan added last fight a little towards different kinds of dishes but not in a completely unpleasant way.
I am interested in doing some more of May’s pasta dishes in the future and seeing how much more he drew from Scappi’s Opera. However, this coming weekend is Easter and I will present the simple but seasonal tansy.
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