Noodles
1 egg. 1/2 teaspon salt. Flour to make dough.
Roll thin. Cut in very narrow strips with sharp knife. Drop in boiling water. Cook twenty minutes. Drain and add to soup.
Yolks of eggs hard boiled, sliced or run through ricer makes a pretty garnish for yellow soups. Lemon sliced thin looks pretty and suits some soups.
A bare-bones egg noodle for garnishing soup, written for cooks who already knew what noodle dough should feel like. Two things need adjusting: the flour is unmeasured, and the cooking time belongs to a much thicker, drier noodle.
- Cook them far less than twenty minutesStrips rolled genuinely thin and cut narrow are done in two to four minutes in boiling water — they float and lose their raw floury bite. Twenty minutes will reduce fresh noodles to paste. The long time may reflect a thicker or part-dried noodle, but the recipe as printed gives no drying instruction.
- "Flour to make dough"For one egg plus the salt, expect roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of all-purpose flour, added a spoonful at a time until the dough is stiff and no longer tacky. It should feel drier and firmer than bread dough; a soft dough will not roll thin without tearing.
- Rest before rollingKnead five minutes, then cover and leave 20–30 minutes. Unrested dough springs back and you will never get it thin enough for the narrow strips the recipe wants.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll to about 1/16 inch, flour the sheet, roll it loosely into a cylinder and slice across into 1/8-inch ribbons, then shake them apart. A pasta machine does the same work if you have one.
- Salt the waterBoil the noodles in salted water, and cook them separately as directed rather than in the soup itself — starch shed from raw noodles clouds a clear broth.
- YieldOne egg's worth makes only a small quantity of noodles, enough to garnish a few servings of soup rather than to serve as a main starch. Double or triple for a substantial noodle soup.
- The garnishesHard-boiled yolk pressed through a ricer and thin lemon slices are both added at serving, not cooked in. Lemon suits clear chicken and beef broths; acid can curdle a cream soup.
The word itself comes from the German *Nudel*, and egg noodles reached American kitchens largely through German and Central European immigration; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks often group them with *Spätzle*, dumplings and soup balls rather than with macaroni, which was understood as an Italian import and treated separately. The unspecified flour is characteristic of the genre: a household cook was expected to know a stiff dough by feel. The closing lines on riced yolk and sliced lemon are a reminder that garnishing in these books was as much about the look of the tureen as about flavor.