Mamie Blues' pink gnocchis
This recipe was written and sent by Fanny Provençal.
“The so-called Mamie blue was an Italian grandmother living in the French town of Vedène, near the notorious city of Avignon. On Saturday evenings, she would very often cook gnocchis for the whole the family. The original recipe included potato gnocchis served alongside a sauce of tomatoes and meat. I decided to mimic the color of the original recipe but make it vegetarian… and pink!”
Fanny Provençal
About food colorings
Foods colorings have been part of cooking since times immemorial. As early as 1500BC, Egyptian papyruses mention how the yellow of safran was used to fill distilled drinks with sunlight[1], potassium nitrate to enrich the green of vegetables, and cochineal and beetroot to artificially enhance the color of red wines or meats[2].
The use of food colorings has, however, always been a double edged sword. Often expensive, the consistant use of colorings often led to the belief that brightly colored foods were of higher quality and more nutritious. This fact evidently encouraged fraud and the use of cheap, sometimes harmful substitues to add value.
If coper was once used to fake the golden color of fresh French pastries and save on the price of eggs, chalk to whiten watered-down milk, grounded animal bones to give consistency to wheat flour, the dangers of food colorings came mainly from the fact that they could help disguise inferior products and pass them as fresh when spoiled. Many health incidents related to the sale of colorful rancid foods have helped paved the way to our contemporary legislations, compelling producers to officially list down every ingredient used in the production of their foods.
If food colorings are still widely used nowadays, though hidden under natural-sounding pseudonyms, one artificial color is steadily gaining ground: blue. If keeping away from black, blue or purple foods have always guaranteed the safety of early human populations, the last 50 years have indeed seen blue food coloring become a marketing tool to define processed foods destined to a young “courageous” public. From electric blue energy drinks, blue chips or transparent blue candy, these “fun”, “weird”, “undefinable” foods, are today a real part of the market[3], making us face the fact that marketing can help sell anything.
The recipe (for approx. 4 people)
Ingredients
Gnocchi: 500g of potatoes
200g of beetroots
280g of flour
Pesto: Beetroots tops
30g of walnuts
30g of Parmesan cheese
1 garlic clove
6 tbs of olive oil
Process
Gnocchi:
- Put the potatoes and beetroots in a large pot of salted water.
- Bring the water to a boil, lower the heat.
- Cook until you can easily pierce through the potato with the tip of a fork.
- Drain and set aside until cool enough to handle (but still warm).
- Using a peeler or you fingers, remove the skin from both potatoes and beetroots.
- In a medium sized bowl, mash the two until smooth.
- Season to taste with salt and pepper.
- Add the flour and gently stir until combined. The dough mustn’t be sticky anymore but thick.
- Cut the dough into 4.
- Roll out each piece of dough into a long rope, about 2 cm wide.
- Slice it into small regular squares, setting them aside on a floured surface.
- Repeat the operation with the other pieces of dough.
- If you want to add a traditional pattern to them, place a fork on your work surface and slide each square of gnocchi from the base of the fork to the top.
- Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and pour the gnocchi in it, stirring gently once or twice to ensure they are not sticking to each other.
- When the gnocchi’s come to the surface, wait another 20 seconds and fish them out with a slotted spoon.
Pesto:
- Pulse the beetroots tops and walnuts in a food processor.
- Add the garlic and cheese and pour in the olive oil.
- Add salt and pepper to taste.
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