Noodle Soup
Six eggs, break into flour to make stiff dough; little salt. Roll out into sheets as thin as paper; let dry before cutting. Roll up; cut very fine; noodles added ten minutes before serving the soup.
This is a noodle formula rather than a full soup recipe — the broth is assumed. Expect to work by feel, since the flour is unmeasured.
- The proportionsSix eggs will probably take somewhere in the region of 3½ to 4½ cups of all-purpose flour, but "break into flour to make stiff dough" means exactly that: add flour until the dough is firm and barely tacky, not smooth and soft. Egg sizes vary, so start with less flour than you think and work more in as needed.
- The hinge: dry, then cutThe sheets must be leather-dry at the surface before rolling and slicing, or the coils stick together and you get a solid rope instead of strands. Twenty to thirty minutes on a floured cloth is usually enough; the sheet should feel like suede and still bend without cracking.
- "Thin as paper"By hand this means rolling until you can see the shape of your hand through the sheet. A pasta roller taken to its second-thinnest setting does the same job in a fraction of the time.
- Ten minutes is too longFresh egg noodles this thin cook in 2 to 4 minutes in simmering broth. Ten minutes may simply be the time allowed for the soup to come back to the boil and the noodles to soften thoroughly. Taste at two minutes.
- The brothNo stock is specified; you will need to supply your own. Use a generous quantity of well-seasoned beef or chicken stock -- three quarts or more for a batch this size -- and salt the broth, since the dough carries almost none.
- YieldSix eggs' worth of dough is a large batch — enough noodles for 8 to 10 servings of soup. Cut the recipe in half for a family meal, or dry the surplus completely and keep it in a tin.
- Drying for storageIf you intend to store rather than cook the same day, spread the cut noodles in a single loose layer and leave them until they snap cleanly, then keep them airtight. Coils that are only half-dry will mould.
History: Noodle soup in an American book of this period is often German or Austrian in descent -- the Nudelsuppe found in Pennsylvania and Midwestern kitchens, where a clear beef broth was garnished with hand-cut egg noodles rather than thickened or filled -- though hand-cut noodles in broth were not confined to one tradition. The technique of rolling an egg-rich dough paper thin, drying it to leather, coiling it and shaving off fine strands is still in use in German-speaking Europe and elsewhere. The absence of any flour measurement is common in cookbooks of this kind, which assumed a reader already familiar with noodle dough and needed only the egg count and the reminder to let the sheets dry.