Gnocchi à la Parisienne

Thursday June 21

This is one of the genuine early-20th-century recipes you can still find, as if encased in amber, in Beard on Pasta. It's basically pasta with mushroom, ham and cream sauce, but not only are you supposed to make the gnocchi out of choux paste, and enrobe the whole thing in a Madeira-tinted béchamel, but you pile the result into individual puff-pastry vols-au-vent. At least three species of stodge. No wonder the man weighed four hundred pounds.

We wanted something to do with an end knob of first-cut ham and a pound of mushrooms. So we simplified, adapted, improved. First we started the water for gnocchi - Trader Joe's potato gnocchi, so Italian, not French. We sliced and sautéed the mushrooms with some fresh thyme from the garden, while cutting the ham into batons. When the mushrooms were dark, we added heavy cream and cooked it down. The ham went in at the very end, just before we drained the gnocchi and tossed the whole thing together. No Madeira, which would have interfered with the flavor of the thyme.

The result was rich and succulent enough for Beard himself - though if he were around, we probably would have disguised it under the name Gnocchi alla Parigi.