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Nouilles
Nouilles are made of delicate pastry, cut up into ribands and various shapes, and used as a substitute for vermicelli and macaroni, either in making fritters or puddings, or for serving with cheese, or in soup. They are made as follows. Take half a pound of fine flour, put it on the pastry-board, make a hole in the centre, and in this put two eggs. Add a pinch of salt, half an ounce of butter, and a tea-spoonful of cold water, and mix all together into a very firm, smooth paste. Leave it a little while to dry, then roll it out as thin as possible, and cut it into thin bands an inch and a quarter in width. Dredge a little flour upon these, and lay four or five of them one above another, then cut them through into thin shreds, something like vermicelli; shake them well, to prevent their sticking together, and spread them out to dry. Nouilles cannot be made without a straight rolling-pin and smooth pastry-board. When wanted for use, drop them gradually into boiling water, stirring gently with a wooden spoon to keep them from getting lumpy. Let them boil from six to twenty minutes, then take them up with a strainer, drain them well, and spread them out on a coarse cloth. Besides thread-like nouilles, a few may be made the size and shape of scarlet-runner beans, or small birds'-eggs, or they may be cut broad like macaroni. If thoroughly dried, they will keep any length of time stored in tin canisters. Probable cost, 3d. for this quantity.
This is plain egg pasta, made rich enough with two eggs to half a pound of flour that it dries and keeps. Most of the recipe holds up; the boiling time is the part to ignore.
- Boiling timeSix to twenty minutes will turn thread-thin nouilles to mush. Fresh, they need 2-3 minutes in well-salted water; thoroughly dried, 4-6. The wider macaroni-style bands and the bean-shaped pieces take longer, perhaps 8-10 minutes dried. Taste rather than time them.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of fine flour is about 225 g, half an ounce of butter about 15 g. Two eggs plus a teaspoon of water is a deliberately dry dough, which is what makes it roll thin and dry hard. Expect to knead it 8-10 minutes before it looks smooth.
- "Leave it a little while to dry"Most likely a rest rather than a true drying. Wrap the dough and leave it 30 minutes at room temperature so the gluten relaxes; an unrested dough of this stiffness will fight the pin and spring back.
- The rolling-pinThe insistence on a straight pin and smooth board makes sense: a tapered pin makes even thinness harder to achieve on a dough this firm. A pasta machine does the same job, taking the sheet down to the second-thinnest setting.
- Flour"Fine flour" here is plain soft white flour, not semolina. Modern all-purpose works; bread flour or 00 gives a firmer bite and is easier to roll thin.
- Drying and storageFor real keeping quality the shreds must be bone-dry and brittle before they go into a tin, and stored somewhere genuinely dry. Egg pasta that is only part-dried will mould in a sealed container. A day spread on a cloth or rack, turned once, is usually enough; a few weeks in the tin rather than "any length of time" is the safer expectation.
- YieldThis quantity gives roughly 340 g of fresh dough, rather less once dried: three to four portions as a dish with butter and cheese, or garnish for six to eight plates of soup.
Nouilles is the French rendering of the German Nudeln, and the word appears to have carried the dish into French cookery through Alsace and the eastern provinces, where egg noodles were long a staple. That borrowing is why a Victorian English cookery dictionary files them under a French name while describing them as a substitute for the Italian vermicelli and macaroni that British kitchens already knew. Nouilles were treated as a component: something a household kept dried in a canister to thicken soup, bulk out a pudding, or serve with cheese. The costing of threepence for this quantity is the point being made as much as the method -- this was the cheap answer to bought pasta, which in the later nineteenth century was still largely an imported grocery item in Britain.