"I don’t know anybody on the planet who’s as impassioned about gnocchi as I am,” Christine Hickman laughed ruefully one evening in her well-appointed passive solar kitchen on the north side of Santa Fe. “There’s got to be. But I don’t know who would write a whole cookbook on it.”

Hickman was referring to her new culinary tome Gnocchi Solo Gnocchi: A Comprehensive Tribute to Italy’s Other Favorite First Course. In it, the longtime Santa Fe resident — a former pastry chef at Deborah Madison and David Tanis’ late, great Café Escalera — details her zest for the small hand-formed football-shaped dumplings, a cousin to pasta, that she calls “the quintessential Italian comfort food.” Hickman, who has spent more than 30 summers cooking and teaching in Italy, presents her labor of gnocchi love on Sunday, Dec. 9, at Garcia Street Books; in January, she teaches a class in gnocchi preparation at Las Cosas Kitchen Shoppe.