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Flour (Beat egg slightly add salt)
Beat egg slightly, add salt, and flour enough to make very stiff dough; knead, toss on slightly floured board, and roll thinly as possible, which may be as thin as paper. Cover with towel, and set aside for twenty minutes; then cut in fancy shapes, using sharp knife or French vegetable cutter; or the thin sheet may be rolled like jelly-roll, cut in slices as thinly as possible, and pieces unrolled. Dry, and when needed cook twenty minutes in boiling salted water; drain, and add to soup.
Noodies may be served as a vegetable.
This is Fannie Farmer's egg noodle for garnishing clear and creamed soups; the ingredient line in the original book runs simply "1 egg, ¼ teaspoon salt, flour." The dough is stiffer than pasta cooks are used to, and the cooking time is the one instruction not to follow.
- QuantitiesOne large egg plus a quarter teaspoon of salt will take roughly 3/4 cup of flour before it stops accepting more; the original gives no flour quantity at all, only "flour enough to make very stiff dough." Work in flour until the dough is dry to the touch and barely tacky.
- Cooking timeTwenty minutes will reduce paper-thin noodles to mush. Fresh ones are done in 1 to 2 minutes in boiling salted water, thoroughly dried ones in 4 to 6. Taste rather than time them.
- The hinge: a stiff doughAlmost all the difficulty here comes from a dough that is too soft to roll thin. It should feel like modelling clay, not bread dough, and it should be kneaded until smooth. A slack dough will stick, tear, and swell into dumplings in the pot.
- The twenty-minute restThis is not optional. The covered rest relaxes the gluten so the sheet stops springing back, which is what makes rolling "as thin as paper" possible at all.
- Rolling by machineA hand-cranked pasta roller does the same job; take the sheet to the second-thinnest setting. Cut the coiled sheet crosswise with a very sharp knife or dust it heavily with flour first, or the slices will weld together.
- French vegetable cutterA small tinned cutter for stamping rounds, stars and crescents out of carrot and turnip. Any small aspic or canapé cutter gives the same fancy shapes for a clear soup.
- Drying and keepingSpread the cut noodles in a single layer on a floured towel and leave them until brittle, a few hours to overnight depending on the room. Fully dry, they keep for weeks in a tin; partly dry, they mould.
- YieldOne egg makes enough noodles to garnish four to six bowls of soup, or two modest servings if you follow the last line and treat them as a vegetable — in which case toss them with butter after draining.
Noodles reached American cookbooks largely through German and Central European kitchens, and the word itself is a borrowing of German Nudel. Its place among the soup accompaniments is telling: the noodle appears here as a garnish, cut into stars and crescents to give visual interest to a thin or creamed soup, in the same spirit as the fried croutons and custard dice that surround it in the book. The final sentence allows that noodles "may be served as a vegetable," and the form "Noodies" appears to be an artefact of the transcription rather than the printed page.