Home › Soup Accessories › Soup Accessories (Other egg well beaten Shape)
Soup Accessories (Other egg well beaten Shape)
other egg well beaten. Shape the mass into tiny balls, roll them in flour, and fry brown in the frying-pan with a little butter, tossing them about while frying to prevent their sticking to the pan. They may be made some time before needed.
NOODLES-Stir sufficient flour into a slightly beaten egg to make a very stiff dough. Add salt, knead, and roll as thin as possible. It should be of almost paperlike thinness. Cover the molding board on which it is spread with a towel and let the dough remain untouched for a half hour. Then cut in fancy small shapes using a French vegetable cutter. Dry, and, when needed, place in boiling water and let cook rapidly for fifteen minutes. This dough may also be rolled, cut into threads and used like macaroni in soup.
Two soup garnishes run together here: the tail end of a fried forcemeat or egg-ball recipe, then a full set of instructions for egg noodles. Both are still worth making; the noodle timing is the one thing to disregard.
- The text begins mid-recipe"Other egg well beaten" is the last line of the preceding entry, almost certainly egg balls or a forcemeat bound with hard-boiled yolk. Read the frying instructions as a finish to something you already have; the noodle recipe below is complete in itself.
- No quantities for the noodlesThe dough is built by feel: flour is stirred into a beaten egg until it stops accepting more, which in a modern kitchen tends to work out near 3/4 cup of flour to one large egg. The book asks for a very stiff dough, since it is rolled by hand and must not slump.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longFifteen minutes is long -- Paper-thin egg noodles, fresh or dried at home, are generally done in a few minutes; at a quarter of an hour they will be badly overcooked and will shed starch into the soup. Start tasting early.
- The half-hour rest is the hingeDon't skip it. The covered rest lets the gluten relax so the sheet will take the final, hardest rolling without springing back or tearing. A stiff egg dough rolled straight through is much harder to bring to the 'paperlike thinness' asked for.
- French vegetable cutterA set of small tinned-steel cutters in stars, crescents, diamonds and rounds, sold for garnishing consommé. Aspic or petit-four cutters do the same job; so does a knife and a steady hand for squares and diamonds.
- Drying and keepingSpread the cut shapes in a single layer on a floured cloth and leave them at room temperature until brittle, several hours to overnight. Once fully dry they store well in a tin, which is the point of the book's 'Dry, and, when needed'.
- Salt the water, not just the doughThe salt kneaded in seasons the noodle only slightly. Cook them in well-salted water, or directly in the finished broth if you want the starch to give the soup a little body.
- Frying the ballsKeep the butter moderate — around medium heat — and keep the pan moving. Butter over high heat will brown and burn before the interiors of the balls set, and the flour coating scorches quickly.
- YieldRoughly one egg's worth of dough is enough to garnish a half-dozen or so bowls of clear soup, which is all these are meant to do.
Soup accessories occupy their own chapter in many turn-of-the-century American cookbooks because clear soup was a course in its own right, and a plain consomme was often expected to arrive carrying something: custard royale, marrow balls, egg balls, croutons, or noodles cut into stars and crescents. Nudeln -- a stiff egg-and-flour dough rolled thin, dried, and stored -- were a staple of German and Pennsylvania Dutch kitchens, and Nudelsuppe and the Alsatian and Austrian garnish traditions belong to the same family; but a thin egg dough cut into fancy shapes for consomme is equally at home in the French repertoire that the 'French vegetable cutter' points to. The suggestion at the end that the same dough be cut into threads 'and used like macaroni' sets the familiar Italian pasta against the homemade noodle.