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Noodles
flour teaspoon salt 1 egg cayenne slight grating of nutmeg Beat egg. Add seasonings and enough flour to make a stiff dough. Work on floured board until smooth and elastic. Cut a small portion and roll thin as a wafer. Cut in fancy shapes and cook in boiling salted water or soup stock twenty minutes. Serve hot in soups.
This paste may be spread on the bottom of inverted dripping pans and baked in a quick oven. Crease before removing from pan.
A one-egg noodle dough, printed with its flour quantity lost in the ingredient line. The proportions are easy to recover, but the cooking time is not to be trusted.
- The missing flour measureThe original ingredient list opens with "flour" and no amount. One egg with salt will absorb roughly 3/4 cup of all-purpose flour before it stops taking more; work it in by degrees and stop when the dough is stiff and no longer tacky.
- Twenty minutes is far too longTwenty minutes is long -- sheets rolled "thin as a wafer" will be cooked through in a few minutes in boiling salted water or stock. Check early rather than following the stated time; held the full twenty they go to mush and cloud the soup.
- Rest the doughAfter kneading until smooth and elastic, cover and leave it 20 to 30 minutes. The gluten relaxes and the dough will roll far thinner without springing back, which is the whole point of the recipe.
- Quick ovenFor the baked version, roughly 400-450F. The sheets are thin and will color in a few minutes, so watch rather than time them.
- Inverted dripping pansA dripping pan is a shallow rectangular roasting pan. Turned upside down it gives a flat, rimless baking surface from which the thin sheet can be lifted or slid off cleanly; a rimless baking sheet or the back of a sheet pan does the same job. "Crease before removing" means score the sheet into portions while it is still warm and pliable, so it breaks cleanly.
- Cayenne and nutmegBoth are meant as a whisper: a pinch of cayenne and no more than two or three passes on a fine grater for the nutmeg. The seasoning is for consommé and clear soups, where it is the only flavor in the bowl besides the stock.
- YieldOne egg with about 3/4 cup flour makes roughly 5 ounces of dough, enough garnish noodles for several servings of soup. Roll and cut one small portion at a time as instructed, keeping the rest covered so it does not skin over.
Noodles came into American cookbooks largely through German households, and the word itself is a borrowing of German Nudel; nineteenth-century books commonly treat the dough as a soup garnish rather than a dish in its own right. That is its role here: a clear broth was judged partly on the neatness of what floated in it, hence the instruction to cut fancy shapes. Lowney's was a chocolate company's promotional cookbook that also carried a broad range of general household cookery, which is why a plain egg paste sits alongside the candy formulas.