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Noodle Pudding
1 pint noodles 3/4 cupful sugar 4 eggs 1/4 cupful melted Crisco 1 lemon 1/4 cupful blanched and chopped almonds 2 cupfuls milk 1/4 teaspoonful salt Throw noodles into boiling salted water, and cook five minutes. Drain in colander. Beat eggs until light and stir in the noodles. Grease pudding dish with Crisco, put in layer of noodles, sprinkle with sugar, almonds, grated lemon peel, and melted Crisco. Then add another layer of noodles and proceed as before, until all are used up. Add milk and salt, and bake one hour in moderate oven. Serve hot with milk or cream. This pudding is delicious with stewed fruits.
A plain baked kugel from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, built as a layered noodle custard. Two things need attention: the vague noodle measure and the fact that the custard, not the noodles, decides when it is done.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. The dish is an egg custard poured over starch, so anything hotter curdles the milk before the centre sets; an hour at 350F is about right for a 2-quart dish.
- "1 pint noodles"A volume measure with no weight behind it. The instruction to throw the noodles into boiling water suggests they are measured dry, in which case a pint is roughly 4 ounces of fine egg noodles. Less noodle gives a custard-heavy pudding, more a dense, sliceable one.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, which is why shortening appears where an older kugel would use butter or rendered fat. Melted unsalted butter is a straight substitution by volume and tastes better here.
- The lemonOnly the grated peel is used. Zest the whole lemon before you start, keep the juice for the stewed fruit, and avoid the white pith, which turns bitter after an hour in the oven.
- Five minutes in the waterDeliberately underdone. The noodles finish cooking in the milk, so boiling them to full tenderness first gives a pasty pudding. Drain well but do not rinse.
- Adding the milkPour the milk and salt down the side of the dish rather than over the top, so the sugar and almonds stay in place. Let it stand ten minutes before baking so the noodles absorb some liquid.
- Testing for doneThe top should be set and lightly browned and a knife slid into the centre should come out clean. If the middle still trembles as liquid, give it another ten minutes; a water bath is not needed but keeps the edges softer.
- YieldProbably about six servings, in a shallow 2-quart dish. Serve hot with milk or cream, or with stewed fruit, as the original suggests.
Noodle puddings of this kind are the sweet kugel of Central and Eastern European Jewish cooking, layered with sugar, nuts and lemon peel and baked until the custard sets; sweetened noodle dishes with almonds and citrus were also long established in German and Austrian home cooking, and the two traditions overlap closely. Its appearance in an American cookbook of the 1910s reflects both the influence of German and Central European immigrant households and the era's fondness for milk-and-egg baked puddings, which stretched a small quantity of noodles into a dinner-ending dish. The Crisco in place of butter marks the book's origin: it was produced to demonstrate that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, could stand in for butter and lard in every course, puddings included.