Creamy Sausage Gnocchi

Shakespeare set his tragedy in Verona, and while Romeo and Juliet are fictional, the Veronese aristocratic household of the sixteenth century is not. The great families of Verona — the Scaligeri, the della Scala, the Maffei — maintained kitchen accounts that survive in the Archivio di Stato di Verona, and these records show that gnocchi appeared at virtually every significant feast from the fourteenth century onward. The Veronese made theirs with potato — introduced to northern Italy in the 1560s by Venetian merchants returning from Spain — mixed with flour and egg yolk into a dough of deliberate softness. The sauce for feast-day gnocchi in Verona was typically built on the luganega, the coiled pork sausage that the city had been making since Roman times, crumbled into a base of onion and white wine and finished with cream from the dairy farms of the surrounding Valpolicella. The result was a dish of such richness that the household accounts often note it was served in small portions preceding roasted meat — a first course, not a main, because no one who ate a full serving could manage what came next. This version serves it as the main event, which is what it has always deserved to be.