[Sca-cooks] Period or no?

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

Ruperto de Nola has a recipe for spaetzle-like cheese dumplings:

VENETIAN XINXANELLA
XINXANELLA A LA VENECIANA

Take fat cheese, and grate a good handful of it, and grated bread from a small loaf of three blancas, and three maravedis of fine spice, and one maravedi of saffron, and eight eggs, and let all be well-mixed, and kneaded all together; and when all is well-mashed, take the cheese grater turned back to front, and put this paste on it; and when the broth is boiling vigorously and is fatty you must make this paste pass through the holes of the grater above the pot in such a manner that what passes through goes into the pot; and when everything has been passed through, let it cook like fideos or like morteruelo; and when it is cooked, prepare dishes.  But let it be thin, mixed with a little of the broth, so that it is not as thick as fideos.  However, let the broth be fatty, and if it is fatty beef broth, it will be a very good dish, amongst the best in the world; and with the quantities mentioned above you can make about eight dishes.

Ruperto de Nola, "Libro de Guisados" 1529 (recipe also appears in 1520 Catalan edition)
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-MANUSCRIPTS/Guisados1-art.text

Although the recipe says it is particularly good with beef broth, it would also be appropriate to use chicken broth.  Since the dough is to be thinned with broth, I think the xinxanellas would be closer in shape to a drop dumpling than the rope-like spaetzle.  I'm not completely sure about the etymology of the term, but "xinxa" is the Catalan word for a roach or a bedbug.  (Don't freak out -- after all, "vermicelli" means "little worms".)  Since it's allegedly a Venetian recipe, would any of our Italian scholars care to weigh in?




Robin Carroll-Mann
rcmann4 at earthlink.net