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NOUILLES, FRITTERS OF (delicious eaten cold)
Make a pound of flour into nouilles pastry, as already directed (see NOUILLES). Cut it into thin strips; boil a pint and a half of cream or new milk in a saucepan. Dissolve in it six ounces of fresh butter, add a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar which has been well rubbed upon the rind of a large fresh lemon, and a pinch of salt. Drop the pastry into the boiling liquid, and simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour, until it has become a stiff paste. Take it from the fire, and when it is cool stir briskly in with it the well-beaten yolks of six eggs. Spread it out on a large buttered baking-tin, about a quarter of an inch thick, and bake in a moderate oven; when brightly coloured, take it out, divide it in halves, put one half upon a large flat dish, spread some jam thickly over, place the other half upon it, pressing it lightly with the fingers, and when quite cold, stamp it in small shapes with an ordinary pastry-cutter. Serve neatly arranged on a napkin. These cakes should be prepared the day they are wanted for use, as they do not improve with keeping. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 10d., if simmered in milk. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A sweet noodle pudding baked firm, sandwiched with jam and cut into shapes. It is straightforward, but two stages decide whether it works: the long simmer down to a stiff paste, and the temperature of that paste when the yolks go in.
- Nouilles pastrySimply egg noodle dough: flour worked to a stiff paste with egg yolks (or whole eggs) and a little salt, rested, rolled very thin and cut into narrow strips. Fresh tagliatelle or fettuccine, cut into short lengths, stands in perfectly well for a pound of flour's worth.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a solid cone and broken up as needed. Granulated sugar is the direct replacement; the point of rubbing it on the lemon is to abrade the zest and the oil into the crystals, so use whole cubes or coarse sugar and a whole unwaxed lemon.
- The liquid measureA pint and a half imperial is about 30 fl oz, or a little under 4 US cups. With six ounces of butter and four of sugar in it, the mixture is very rich, which is why it thickens to a paste rather than staying soupy.
- The simmerThree-quarters of an hour over direct heat will scorch on the bottom of a thin pan. Use the heaviest saucepan you have, keep it barely bubbling, and stir often as it stiffens; the noodles are being cooked to collapse, not to al dente.
- Adding the yolksThe instruction to cool the paste first is the hinge. Beaten yolks stirred into anything near boiling will set into threads instead of binding the mass, and the baked slab will be grainy rather than sliceable.
- Oven"A moderate oven" is usually taken today as somewhere around 350F/180C; the book gives no temperature. Twenty minutes at about that heat over a quarter-inch layer should give the "bright colour" wanted; the surface should be set and freckled gold, not dry through.
- Assembly and cuttingHalve the hot slab, spread the lower half with a firm jam (apricot or raspberry), top and press. Let it go completely cold before stamping, or the rounds tear and the jam runs out at the edges.
- Yield and keepingEight to ten portions, as stated. The advice to make them the same day is sound: the noodle paste dries and hardens overnight, and the jam softens the layers where it touches. Presumably the title's "delicious eaten cold" means cooled on the day of making rather than kept.
Nouilles is simply the French for noodles, borrowed in turn from the German Nudel. Sweet noodle dishes of this kind — noodles stewed soft in sweetened milk, bound with egg, baked and served with jam or preserves — have close parallels in the Austrian, Bohemian and Jewish culinary traditions of central Europe, where noodle kugels and the various baked Nudelauflauf survive, though sweet baked noodle puddings appear in English cookery too. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for the large late-nineteenth-century English household, gathered such continental sweets alongside native puddings and gave each a "probable cost", here 1s. 10d.