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Noodle Balls
Use Noodle Mixture, allowing less flour, shape into round marbles, and cook in boiling salted water twenty to thirty minutes. Serve hot in soups. 2 egg yolks 1/2 cup beef stock 1 whole egg
A fragment that depends on the book's basic Noodle Mixture, printed just above it, with the ingredient line garbled in the original setting. What follows fills in the gaps a modern cook will trip over.
- The dough it refers toThe book's noodle mixture is built on egg yolks and a whole egg worked with flour. For balls the recipe calls for "less flour," i.e. a slacker, tacky dough that still holds a shape when rolled between the palms.
- The broken ingredient lineThe trailing "2 egg yolks cup beef stock 1 whole egg" is a mangled ingredient list; the fraction before "cup beef stock" has dropped out of the type and cannot be recovered honestly. Treat the stock as a few tablespoons at most, added only if the dough is too dry to come together.
- Timing, which is the real problemTwenty to thirty minutes will turn marble-sized egg dumplings into swollen, waterlogged pellets. Made at the size described they are done in eight to ten minutes — they float, then need a minute or two more to set through the center. Cut one open to check rather than watching the clock.
- Size"Round marbles" means roughly half an inch, no larger. They swell noticeably in the water, and anything bigger stops being a garnish and starts being a dumpling course.
- Cook them separatelyThe recipe cooks them in salted water rather than in the soup, and there is a practical advantage: loose surface flour would cloud a clear broth. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and add them to the hot soup.
- Holding themThey are best used within a few minutes of cooking. If you must hold them, keep them in a little warm stock rather than water, which leaches them flat.
Egg-and-flour dumplings dropped into clear broth are a fixture of German and Austrian soup cookery, where they run from rolled noodles through Spätzle to the little marbles this recipe describes, and they are often said to have arrived in American cookbooks along with the large nineteenth-century German immigration. Lowney's Cook Book, issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early 1900s and compiled by Maria Willett Howard, is best remembered for its chocolate work, but like most manufacturer-sponsored books of the era it aimed to be a complete household manual, which is why a filed-away soup garnish finds a place in it at all. The construction is thrifty in the period manner: one basic noodle dough, rolled and cut for noodles or rolled into balls, with no separate recipe needed.