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Clear Soup with Noodles
Peel and slice enough carrots, onions, and green leeks to make a pint; cut a small young cabbage into thin shreds, put all in a saucepan with a piece of butter the size of an egg, cover and put over a slow fire and cook until quite tender, shaking the pan or stirring carefully several times to be sure that they do not stick to the bottom of the pan. When the vegetables are cooked, pour over them 3 pints of clear soup and boil thirty minutes. To make the noodles: Beat 1/4 of a pound of slightly softened butter until very creamy, then beat in slowly 3 tablespoonfuls of flour and 3 well-beaten eggs. Beat until very smooth. Strain the soup and return it to the saucepan, and when it boils roll the paste into small round balls with the hands, dipping them frequently in cold water to prevent the balls from sticking, drop them into the boiling soup and cook steadily for fifteen minutes, pour into the soup tureen and serve.
A two-part recipe: a sweated vegetable base finished as a clear soup, then butter dumplings poached in it. The name is misleading, and the dumpling batter is the part that needs judgment.
- The "noodles" are dumplingsNothing here is rolled or cut into strips. The butter-egg-flour paste is a soft poached dumpling in the German Butterkloss style, closer to a matzo ball in handling than to pasta.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The quarter pound called for in the dumplings is 8 tablespoons, 113 g.
- Clear soupMeans a strained, fat-free meat stock or consomme, not a canned broth. Three pints is 6 cups; if using commercial stock, choose an unsalted one, since boiling it thirty minutes with vegetables concentrates it noticeably.
- Sweat, do not brownThe covered pan over a slow fire is a sweat: low heat, a lid, the vegetables softening in their own moisture. Any colour on the carrots or onions will tint the finished soup and defeat the point of clarifying it.
- The vegetables are discardedStraining after the thirty-minute boil removes them entirely; they exist to flavour the stock. A pint of sliced vegetables is roughly 2 cups by volume, so about 2 medium carrots, 1 onion and 2 leeks, plus the shredded cabbage.
- The flour proportion is very lowThree tablespoons of flour to 8 tablespoons of butter and 3 eggs gives a very soft batter that may prove too slack to roll between wet hands as the recipe directs. Chill it thoroughly and poach one test dumpling before committing the batch; be prepared to work with two spoons rather than your palms, and to add flour if the test disintegrates.
- Keep the soup at a bare simmerThe instruction to drop them into boiling soup and cook steadily should be read as a gentle simmer. A rolling boil will break soft egg-butter dumplings apart and cloud the broth you just strained.
- YieldSix cups of soup serves four to six as a first course, with three or four small dumplings each.
American cookbooks of this period sometimes used "noodle" loosely for flour-and-egg garnishes dropped into broth, which may be how a Central European butter dumpling ends up under this title. The dish belongs to the same family as Austrian and southern German Butternockerl and Markkloesschen, soft spooned dumplings poached directly in clear beef soup and served as a light opening course; German-speaking cooks and their recipes were a presence in American kitchens of the period, and compilations of this kind often absorbed such dishes without preserving their names.