Beat 3 eggs with 2 tablespoonfuls of water and a pinch of salt; then add enough flour to make a stiff dough. Work it well with flour and roll out as thin as possible; fold it double and cut into square pieces and fill with minced cooked chicken or veal. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and bits of butter; fold in the edges. Have ready some soup stock; when boiling, add the crebchen and let boil until done. Serve with the soup.
This is kreplach — filled dough squares poached in broth. The dough is a plain egg noodle dough, so the whole dish hinges on rolling it thin enough that the seams cook through before the filling dries out.
- Roll it thinner than feels sensible"As thin as possible" means you should be able to see the work surface through it, roughly 1/16 inch. Kreplach rolled thick have a raw, gummy seam where the folded edges meet, and no amount of extra boiling fixes it without turning the rest to mush.
- Flour quantity is left openThree eggs plus 2 tablespoons water will take somewhere near 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour, depending on the eggs and the day. Add it gradually and stop when the dough is stiff but still smooth; overshooting gives dough that fights the rolling pin.
- Rest the doughThe original skips this, but 30 minutes covered at room temperature relaxes the gluten and makes thin rolling far easier.
- Cut and fill in batchesEgg dough skins over quickly. Cut squares of about 2 to 2 1/2 inches, keep the unused sheet under a towel, and moisten the edges lightly if they will not seal — the recipe assumes fresh, tacky dough.
- The filling must be cooked already"Minced cooked chicken or veal" is the point: this is a use for leftover boiled fowl or the meat from making the stock itself. Raw meat in a filling this thin will not reach temperature reliably in a short poach.
- Butter and meat togetherBits of butter in a meat filling would not pass in a kosher kitchen, where meat and dairy are kept separate. The book's "Jewish" label is doing loose work here; schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) is the traditional substitute and behaves the same way.
- "Boil until done"In practice 8 to 12 minutes at a gentle simmer, not a hard boil, which tears the seams. They are done when the dough at the folded corner is tender. Cook them in a separate pot of salted water if you want the soup to stay clear, then add them to the bowls.
- YieldThree eggs of dough makes roughly 24 to 30 kreplach — soup for six, at four or five apiece.
Crebchen appears to be a variant transliteration related to kreplach (from Yiddish kreplech, singular krepl), though the route by which the spelling arrived is not established; the name refers to the filled dough parcels that appear across Ashkenazi cooking and are close cousins to Italian ravioli, Polish pierogi and Chinese wontons — a resemblance often remarked on but not traced to any single line of descent. In Jewish practice they are associated with particular days: the eve of Yom Kippur, Purim and Hoshana Rabbah, and the explanation usually offered is that a hidden filling suits festivals whose themes are concealment or judgment. Their appearance in a book like this one, which marches through the year assigning a nation to each date, may suggest how American home-cookery writers of the period tended to treat immigrant kitchens as a source of novelty — collected enthusiastically, labeled by nationality, and reproduced without much attention to the dietary laws that shaped the dish in the first place, as the butter in this filling makes plain.