Noodles
1/2 lb. Gold Medal flour 3 eggs 2 tablespoons lukewarm water 1 teaspoon butter 1 teaspoon salt Sift flour and salt, rub in butter, add gradually the beaten eggs and water, knead the paste for ten minutes, roll out as thin as possible and set aside to dry for fifteen minutes; cut into strips two inches wide, shred each strip into narrow, match-like pieces, let dry on board for thirty minutes. The batter may be rolled as a jelly roll and cut into thin slices. These little, dried whorls when dropped into the hot soup will unroll into ribbons of paste. When needed, cook twenty minutes in boiling salted water, drain and add to consomme. The noodles may be cooked in consomme, but you will not have as clear a soup.
Noodles may be served as a vegetable. Drain noodles when cooked and mix with 1/2 cup of coarse bread crumbs fried in butter, reserving part of the crumbs to put over the top. This is an excellent dish to serve with fried chicken. Noodles are often prepared like macaroni, with cheese and Tomato Sauce.
A straightforward egg noodle dough, with the flour given by weight — which is the easiest part of it to follow today. The one number that needs revising is the cooking time.
- Cook them for minutes, not twentyTwenty minutes suits noodles dried hard and stored for weeks; the fresh strips here, rolled thin and dried the forty-five minutes the recipe specifies, will likely need only a few minutes in boiling salted water. Fish one out and bite it rather than watching the clock.
- Weigh the flour1/2 lb is about 227 g, roughly 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled. Because the hydration comes almost entirely from three eggs, a cup measured loosely or packed will change the dough noticeably.
- Egg sizeEggs of the period ran smaller than today's large. If the dough is sticky after a few minutes of kneading, work in more flour a spoonful at a time; it should be stiff, closer to pasta dough than to bread.
- The ten-minute knead is realThis is a dry, unyielding paste and it takes that long to become smooth. A stand mixer with the dough hook will do it in about five minutes on low, or run it through a pasta machine's rollers repeatedly to laminate.
- "Roll out as thin as possible"By hand that means about 1/16 inch; on a pasta machine, the second-to-last setting. Thickness matters more than width for how the noodles eat.
- Drying times are minimumsFifteen minutes before cutting and thirty after are enough only in a dry, warm kitchen. The sheet should feel leathery, not tacky, or the shreds will weld together on the board.
- The jelly-roll cutDust the rolled sheet generously with flour before rolling it up, or the whorls will not unfurl in the soup as promised. Cut slices about 1/8 inch thick with a sharp knife in one stroke.
- YieldFlour, eggs and water together come to something close to a pound of dough — enough, at a guess, to garnish six to eight bowls of consommé, or four servings as the buttered-crumb side dish.
- Cooking in the consomméThe book is right that it clouds the broth, as surface starch goes straight into it. Boil separately in salted water, drain, and drop into hot consommé at the last moment.
Noodles reached American cookbooks largely through German and Central European kitchens ///em>the word itself is from the German Nudel estandstandard in soup chapters as a homemade garnish for clear broth. The Gold Medal book is a flour miller's promotional cookbook. The closing note that noodles may be dressed with browned bread crumbs, or baked with cheese and tomato sauce "like macaroni," catches the moment when a German household staple and an Italian one were beginning to be treated as the same food.