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Nouilles, Boiled in Milk
Take three-quarters of a pound of freshly-made nouilles cut very fine and dried. Dissolve a little butter in a stewpan, put in the nouilles, and shake the pan over the fire until they are well browned. Pour over them as much good milk as will cover them well, and let them simmer gently until they are quite soft. Add two table-spoonfuls of sugar and three well-beaten eggs, steam a few minutes longer, and serve as hot as possible. Time to boil the nouilles, until soft--from ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A sweet noodle dish somewhere between a pudding and a hot cereal, built on fresh egg noodles browned in butter. The point of failure is the egg at the end.
- Add the eggs off the boilThree beaten eggs stirred into simmering milk will curdle in seconds. Pull the pan from the heat, stir a ladleful of the hot milk into the eggs first, return the mixture to the pan and hold it over the lowest heat until it thickens — the "steam a few minutes" of the original means gentle residual heat, not a rolling simmer.
- NouillesSimply the French for noodles: a fresh egg-and-flour pasta rolled thin, cut into fine ribbons and dried before use. The recipe's nouilles are already dried, so three-quarters of a pound is 12 oz of fine dried egg noodles, or tagliatelle broken short.
- Browning in butterThis is the step that gives the dish its character — a nutty, toasted flavour, as in Central European browned-noodle puddings. Use 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter, keep the pan moving, and stop while the noodles are golden; fine noodles scorch quickly and burnt ones will taint the whole pan.
- How much milk"As much as will cover them well" means at least 3 cups for this quantity, and probably more; add it in stages. Browned noodles drink more than boiled ones, so keep extra warm milk to hand and add it as the pan dries.
- Cooking timeThe stated ten to fifteen minutes is for fine noodles simmering in milk rather than water. Go by softness, and expect the milk to thicken as starch releases into it.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of sugar for four or five servings is restrained by modern dessert standards — this reads as a supper dish rather than a pudding. Taste before the eggs go in and adjust; a scrape of nutmeg, lemon zest or vanilla is entirely in period.
- Cost and yieldEightpence in late-Victorian money marks this as a cheap family dish. It serves four or five as written, and must be eaten straight from the pan — it sets stiff and dull as it cools.
Cassell's uses the French spelling nouilles, but the dish itself looks Central European in character: browned noodles finished with milk, sugar and eggs are often associated with German, Austrian, Bohemian and Jewish home cooking, where they appear under names like Nudelauflauf and lokshen puddings. Nineteenth-century English cookery books often reached for the French term for fresh cut pasta, even when the recipe had travelled by another route. The presence of the dish in a general household dictionary suggests something of the place the fresh egg noodle could occupy in a domestic kitchen: cheap, made from flour and eggs already in the house, and equally at home in a broth or, as here, sweetened for a hot pudding at the end of a plain meal.