Gnocchi Avellinese (Oct 2025)
This is not the restaurant version but my erratic and deformed ear shaped first attempt. The restaurant menu version is, I am pleased to say, far more, well, restaurant !!
Sunday mornings were, for an awkward teenage me, struggling to leave the comfort of a warm bed, the perfect excuse to give in to the fight, if only for one morning knowing that eventually I would be roused from my pit by the sound of sizzling, tough (aka cheap) cuts of various meats browning off in the frying pan, alongside meatballs that mum had freshly shaped into imperfect rounds, waiting to be plopped into the large iron pot simmering with, already wafting up the stairs of our small Victorian terrace, a simple sauce of tomato, garlic, olive oil and maybe a touch of parsley and grating of pecorino Sardo.
Sunday dinner for our us was always this, a slow cooked ragu, served with some kind of pasta. Often it was a shop bought dried pasta, ziti or penne (never rigate, dad didn't like the lines), followed by the unctuous meats, a green side salad with a squeeze of lemon, a pinch of salt and drizzle of olive oil, and of course, bread, also made by mum. On occasion, and never too many for my liking, after eventually dragging myself into the kitchen, mumbling something indefinable to mum, I would notice her hands teasing a sticky warm mix of semolina flour, hot water and salt, into a pliable piece of dough which once rested she would cut chunks from, rolling each piece into long thin sausage shapes, nipping across, ninja like, with a knife cutting inch long nuggets and with the deftness of a magician the ear shaped gnocchi would emerge from under her thumb – mum’s gnocchi – a delight we all looked forward to.
For years I did not know that gnocchi are mostly made with potato, water and semolina flour and shaped into little dumplings. Many years on from the memories of the reluctant-to-leave-his-bed boy, branching out alone, post university, newly in London, I would occasionally pick mum up from the small working class East Anglian town I grew up in and drive her to big, noisy, London, a far cry from anything she would have known, to show off my attempt at creating a life that included hallmarks of her considerable guidance and love.
On one such occasion we ended up in an Italian restaurant inside, of all places, Lakeside shopping centre. Mum, not accustomed to restaurants and looking through menus, asked for my suggestion. I noticed gnocchi on the menu and suggested them, she said she would order them but they weren't what I was thinking i.e. her gnocchi.
Why not? Because gnocchi are made with potato. Yours aren’t. I know, but they usually are. Why are yours not? I don't know, it's how we made them at home.
..referring to her childhood days spent with her sisters and mother, growing and cooking food, in war torn Italy. Sure, enough after a surreal serenade of ‘O Sole Mio’ by the guitar playing Neapolitan waiter, once he had learnt mum was as good as Neapolitan (seriously he had a guitar at work with him) the gnocchi arrived and they were nothing like mum's and instead, as she had told me, small fluffy dumplings, and undoubtedly potatoey.
Orecchiette, meaning small ears, are usually a dried pasta often served in Puglia with a simple tomato and cime di rapa sauce, topped with the poor man’s parmesan: breadcrumbs. Mum’s gnocchi were similar in shape to these little ears but larger. Big little ears. Italian food can be a minefield of phrases and names, ultra localised and often the same name meaning something entirely different elsewhere. The gnocchi served by the excitable Neopolitan waiter in the Lakeside restaurant were good, but they were not the gnocchi I had grown up with. As my years involved with food and hospitality roll on, now sadly, never again with mum's gnocchi, I see that yes, if gnocchi are on a menu or in a recipe book, brought fresh or even in supermarket vac packs they have potato and look like small dumplings. As I recall many of these stories, due to a growing anxiousness or delayed grief, who knows or cares, I think of mum, and finally I had a go at recreating her gnocchi. Of course I had no recipe, mum was not one for recipes, beyond a bit of this, a bit of that, and stop when it is enough or right. My efforts resulted in badly deformed, erratically sized ear shapes but they were tasty and the sauce was right. But still bugging me was why were they called gnocchi while anywhere else in Italy they are not. Where were they from? Was I imagining this or were they simply invented by mum, or her mum? Is this dish just a famiglia Gaeta thing?
A Google search for gnocchi Campania (the region mum was from) produced multitudes of recipes for gnocchi Sorrentina – fluffy, doughy, little potato darlings baked in a tomato sauce and not dissimilar to gnocchi Romana which do not have potato (finally) but still it is neither of these - gnocchi Romana are shaped as most others are and baked (like with Sorrentina) with cheese and eggs but no tomato. Sound great but it is not the childhood dish that had become a bit of an obsession.
I decided on a different tact. Italian food is, as now increasingly acknowledged, very regional. I am delighted to see restaurants opening that serve Sardinian or Sicilian food or whatever the region might be and not a generic Italian food that exists only in the mind of an out of Italy food scene. I wondered how far these regionalities go? Campania is mum’s region but results for that bring up the Sorrentina version which is fair enough as Sorrento is also in Campania. I decide that the next level out or in is Avellino, the largest town and province near to where mum was born and grew up and where much of her family still live. And there they were. Hello gnocchi Avellinese. I am not going to pretend that Google was awash with this dish, no, the search still revealed as I was discovering, the far better known, Gnocchi Sorrentina, but two references, on the first page of results, to Gnocchi Avellinese and just as I remembered them. Semola, hot water and salt, served with a plain tomato sauce - that's them - I have no idea how well known or popular they are but I didn't totally invent this - nor did mum - they exist, Gnocchi Avellinese, and after much trialling, predominantly by our equally bemused Northern Italian chef, with different grades of semolina flours and hot water ratios, crucial to achieving the distinct texture, I am pleased to say that if you are a frequenter of Pritchard & Ure, or can be, debuting on our Southern Italian and Greek inspired menu, one of my favourite childhood memories and dishes - the big little ears.