Noodles
Noodles are an excellent accompaniment to soup and very easily made. Beat one egg slightly, add half a teaspoon of salt, then work in as much flour as the wetting will take up. Knead it well, toss on a floured board and roll out as thin as a sheet of paper. Cover with a towel and set aside for twenty minutes.
Cut into fancy shapes with French vegetable cutters. There may be diamonds, hearts, clover leaves or circles. The sheet may be shredded finely with a sharp vegetable knife or rolled like a jelly roll and cut into the finest shavings. Set aside to dry and use when required, cooking the noodles for twenty minutes before they are needed in boiling salted water. Drain and add to the soup just before sending to the table. Noodles may also be cooked in stock, seasoned and served as a side dish. - See Page XIX.
A one-egg noodle dough, the oldest and simplest form of the thing. Two details need updating: the flour is unmeasured, and the cooking time is far longer than these noodles want.
- How much flour"As much flour as the wetting will take up" comes out at roughly 3/4 cup for one large egg plus salt, though it varies with the egg and the day. Add it a spoonful at a time until the dough is stiff and no longer tacky; a dough this dry looks wrong until you knead it, then it comes together.
- YieldOne egg with that much flour gives roughly 4 to 5 ounces of noodles, enough to garnish four to six bowls of soup. For noodles served as a side dish, count one egg per two people.
- The twenty-minute boilThe text is ambiguous: "cooking the noodles for twenty minutes before they are needed" may mean start them twenty minutes ahead of service rather than boil them for twenty minutes. Either way, fresh or air-dried egg noodles rolled paper-thin cook in 2 to 4 minutes; taste at two minutes and go from there. The twenty-minute rest before cutting is worth keeping -- it relaxes the gluten so the sheet stops springing back.
- Rolling thin"Thin as a sheet of paper" is not hyperbole and is hard work by hand with a stiff dough. A pasta roller taken to its second-thinnest setting gets there without argument; if rolling by hand, divide the dough in two and let it rest whenever it starts fighting you.
- French vegetable cuttersThese were small tinned-steel punches sold in sets for shaping garnishes. Any small aspic or fondant cutter does the same job. Note that punched shapes waste a good deal of dough -- the shredded or jelly-roll method loses nothing.
- Drying and keepingSpread the cut noodles in a single layer on a towel or a rack and leave them until they snap rather than bend, an hour or more depending on the room. Fully dried, they keep for weeks in a jar; partly dried, they mould. Refrigerate or freeze if you are not certain.
- Cook separately, add lateThe advice to boil them in salted water and add them to the soup at the last moment is sound practice, not fussiness. Noodles cooked in the soup itself shed starch and cloud the broth, which matters in the clear consommés this book expects.
The word comes straight from the German Nudel, and egg noodles entered American cooking largely through German-speaking households -- most visibly the Pennsylvania Germans, whose chicken-and-noodle cookery is often said to lie behind a great deal of Midwestern soup. In turn-of-the-century American cookbooks noodles sit firmly in the soup chapter rather than anywhere near what we would now call pasta; they are treated as a garnish, one of a family that includes egg balls, custard royale and fried croutons, whose job was to give a clear broth something to carry. The instruction to punch the sheet into hearts and clover leaves with French vegetable cutters shows the other influence at work: professional garde-manger practice, filtering into domestic kitchens through the cooking schools that shaped books of this period. The author opens, in any case, by insisting that noodles are "very easily made."