Home › The Principles of Cookery › Nouilles, Buttered
Nouilles, Buttered
Throw the nouilles into boiling water, and let them boil for three minutes. Take them up with a strainer, put them on a hot dish; melt some fresh butter in a stewpan; sprinkle a large handful of bread-crumbs in it, and let them remain until they are lightly browned, then put them upon the nouilles. Clarify a little more butter if the first portion was dried up in browning the crumbs, and pour it over the dish; serve very hot. Time, ten minutes to boil the nouilles.
A plain dish of fresh egg noodles finished with browned crumbs and butter — the sort of thing Cassell's expected a cook to know how to make from the previous entry on noodle paste. Two things need sorting out: the contradictory timing and the fact that no quantities are given at all.
- The timing contradictionThe method says three minutes, the footer says ten. Three suits freshly rolled and cut nouilles, which cook very fast; ten would leave them soft to the point of collapse. The footer says "ten minutes to boil the nouilles", so the two figures simply cannot be reconciled from the page itself; follow the three minutes in the method and test as you go.
- Nouilles means fresh egg noodlesAn egg-rich paste rolled very thin, floured, rolled up and shredded; Cassell's gives the paste in a separate entry. Dried commercial egg noodles will do but need their packet time, which is longer than three minutes.
- Salt the waterThe original does not mention it. Noodles boiled in unsalted water cannot be rescued by butter afterwards.
- StewpanA straight-sided pan with a lid — a modern sauté pan or wide saucepan will do. Here it is simply the vessel for browning the crumbs.
- The crumbs are the hingeFresh white crumbs, not dry sandy ones, fried in butter over moderate heat until evenly gold. They go from lightly browned to burnt in well under a minute, and burnt butter crumbs will make the whole dish bitter.
- Clarifying the second butterThe recipe calls for more butter only "if the first portion was dried up in browning the crumbs". Clarified butter pours clear and does not water down the dish; melt it gently, skim the foam, leave the milky sediment behind.
- Quantities and yieldNothing is specified. For four people as a side dish, allow about 12 oz fresh noodles, 3 oz butter in total and a generous handful — roughly 2 oz — of fresh crumbs.
- Serve immediatelyThe insistence on "very hot" is practical: buttered noodles cool fast on a cold plate and the crumbs soften. Warm the dish, and dress the noodles at the last moment.
Nouilles is simply the French for noodles, and its appearance in an English dictionary of cookery reflects the nineteenth-century habit of borrowing the French term to lend an everyday dish some standing at table. The French word is generally derived from the German Nudel, and the dish is long established in Alsace, where buttered noodles are a familiar accompaniment to game and braised meats. The finish here, crumbs fried in butter and strewn over a starch, has a long reach: it turns up on Central European dumplings and pasta alike, and in Poland and Bohemia is applied to everything from pierogi to boiled potatoes.