It’s a classic recipe, often the protagonist of Italian families Sunday lunch: it’s easy to prepare and very tasty, it combines the soft flavour of tomato sauce with the intense taste of cheese and fresh basil.
The preparation brings together some of the typical flavours of the traditional Southern of Italy cuisine from Campania: tomato, mozzarella, basil.
They are strictly served in “pignatielli”, low and rounded terracotta bowls, which, thanks to their slow heating, keep the heat for a long time even after having been baked in the oven.
In fifteenth-century Lombardy, gnocchi made of bread, milk, and ground almonds were called zanzarelli. In his 1570 cookbook, Bartolomeo Scappi has a recipe for “gnocchi” made from a dough of flour and breadcrumbs mixed with water and pushed through the holes of a cheese grater.
A little later, egg, flour, and water were introduced to the recipe, which became known as malfatti. The word means “badly made” and is still the name that Tuscans apply to their spinach and ricotta dumplings, gnudi. (I will post a recipe for gnudi soon).
In the nineteenth century, Pellegrino Artusi, the “grandfather” of Italian cuisine, published a recipe for potato gnocchi prepared in exactly the same way that we see today, complete with the story of a woman whose gnocchi disappeared in the pot she was boiling them in—because she hadn’t used enough flour to hold them together.
FOR THE GNOCCHI ALLA SORRENTINA
500 g of Russet or Baking potatoes
150 g of plain flour
250g of mozzarella cheese, torn into small chunks
8 basil leaves, roughly torn or basil pesto
pecorino, grated (optional)
TO MAKE THE TOMATO SAUCE
500g of passata or cherry tomato
4 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
salt
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