IT STARTED, AS MANY INNOCENT things do, with cheese. Two pints of fresh pillowy Vermont ricotta, about to go bad. I calculated I had a day to salvage them. My son doesn’t eat lasagna. (It’s a combination of ingredients, and he is a purist.) But a quick search yielded a recipe for ricotta gnocchi: the simplest kind of dumpling. I mixed egg yolks, ricotta, Parmesan, salt, and a smattering of flour, and was rewarded with tiny, savory pasta cushions, light as air.
The following morning, my attention was drawn to a shelf of dusty cookbooks containing recipes involving fresh dough. As a rule, I avoid the stuff. When I mix flour with water, I end up with glue. Dried pasta is the best invention of humankind. Why mess with perfection?
But the simplicity of my ricotta gnocchi left me with an itch. I love dumplings, in all varieties. I love potato gnocchi with Genovese pesto. I adore Northern Chinese jiaozi. (I ate eight a day for a whole year in New York in my 20s, at the Eldridge Street storefront that now houses the famed Vanessa’s Dumpling House.) I love Piedmontese agnolotti, Russian pelmeni, Ukrainian pierogi, Japanese gyoza. I love har gow from China, Turkish manti, Nepali momos, kreplach from all of Eastern Europe.
I’ve always judged these too complicated to make—but if my ricotta gnocchi were technically dumplings, perhaps I’d been wrong?
This story is from the October 2019 edition of Vogue.
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This story is from the October 2019 edition of Vogue.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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