Noodles
Flour.
Few grains nutmeg.
PROCESS: Beat egg slightly, add seasonings, add flour enough to make a stiff dough. Knead on a floured board until smooth and elastic. Roll out on a sheet as thin as paper, cover and let stand for half an hour. Roll loosely and cut the desired width, either in threads or ribbons, unroll and scatter over board; let lay half an hour. Cook in boiling, salted water fifteen minutes, drain and add to soup. Noodles may be cooked in Consommé twenty minutes but the soup will not be as clear as when noodles are cooked previously.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — it opens mid-line with "Flour" and the process calls for egg and "seasonings" that were presumably listed above. The working proportions are easy to reconstruct, but the cooking time is the one instruction to ignore.
- ProportionsFor soup noodles of this type, one large egg takes roughly 3/4 cup (about 100 g) of flour plus 1/4 teaspoon salt and the few grains of nutmeg. Add the flour gradually and stop when the dough is genuinely stiff — it should feel too dry to be pleasant, and will soften as it rests.
- Cooking timeFifteen minutes will reduce paper-thin fresh noodles to mush. Dough rolled as thin as this recipe demands is done in 2 to 3 minutes in boiling salted water; taste one rather than watching the clock. The twenty-minute figure for consommé is equally excessive.
- Why cook them separatelyThe instruction is sound and worth following. Boiling noodles directly in consommé leaches starch into it and clouds a broth that has probably just been clarified. Cook, drain, and drop them into the bowls.
- The two restsThe half hour under cover after rolling relaxes the gluten so the sheet does not spring back or tear when cut. The second half hour, spread loose on the board, dries the surfaces so the cut strands are less likely to weld together.
- "As thin as paper"By hand this means you can see the grain of the board through the sheet. A pasta roller taken to its second-thinnest setting gets there faster; divide the dough into two or three pieces first.
- NutmegNot a stray flourish: nutmeg in egg noodles and egg dumplings is common in German cooking. Grate it fresh; a few grains means barely a scrape.
- Yield and keepingOne egg's worth gives enough noodles for four bowls of soup. Dried hard on the board for several hours they will keep for some weeks in a tin.
Egg noodles cut for soup are the German Nudeln that came into American cooking through Pennsylvania and the Midwest, and by the early twentieth century they were familiar enough to need little explanation in a general household manual. The nutmeg and the ribbon-or-thread choice point to that German-American line rather than to Italian pasta, which arrived in American cookbooks along a separate route and generally under the name macaroni. The recipe's insistence on not clouding the soup shows how much a clear consommé was worth to a cook of the period.