Noodle Soup
Add noodles to beef or any other soup after straining; they will cock in fifteen or twenty minutes, and are prepared in the following manner: To one egg add as much sifted flour as it will absorb, with a little salt; roll out as thin as a wafer, dredge very lightly with flour, roll over and over into a large roll, slice from the ends, shake out the strips loosely and drop into the soup.
A one-egg noodle dough stretched thin, rolled, and cut into ribbons — the whole thing hinges on rolling it thinner than feels reasonable.
- The proportionOne egg absorbs roughly 3/4 cup of all-purpose flour, though it varies with egg size and humidity. Work in flour until the dough is stiff and no longer tacky, then let it rest 20 minutes before rolling; unrested dough springs back and will not hold a wafer-thin sheet.
- "Thin as a wafer"This is the instruction that matters. The sheet should be thin enough to read newsprint through. Noodles cut from a thick sheet swell into doughy strips and cloud the broth.
- Cooking timeFifteen to twenty minutes is long for the freshly cut strips the recipe describes; wafer-thin fresh noodles are usually done in 3 to 5 minutes. Taste one rather than trusting the clock, since overcooked egg noodles disintegrate and thicken the soup with starch.
- "They will cock"A typesetter's error for "cook." These books are full of them.
- Dredging and rollingThe light dusting of flour before rolling up the sheet is what keeps the coils from fusing. Too much and it sloughs off into the broth; a bare sifting is enough.
- After strainingThe noodles go in only once the soup has been strained, since they could not survive the strainer. If you want a clear broth, cook the noodles separately in salted water and add them to the bowls, as they shed flour as they cook.
- YieldOne egg's worth of dough comes to roughly 5 ounces of noodles, enough to garnish four to six bowls of soup.
- DryingSpread the cut strips loosely on a towel for 30 minutes if you are not using them at once, or dry them fully and keep them in a tin for a few weeks.
Noodle soup in a cookbook of this period is generally traced to a German ancestry — the *Nudel* of Pennsylvania and Midwestern German settlements, carried into general use through the nineteenth century — though the descent of any particular dish is hard to state with certainty. The technique here, rolling a sheet into a cylinder and slicing coins from the end, is the standard hand method for cutting fine ribbons without a machine, and similar wording recurs across the community cookbooks of the period, which borrowed freely from one another. *The Dixie Cook-Book*, published for a Southern market but itself an adaptation of the Ohio-based *Buckeye Cookery*, places it in the soup chapter as an addition rather than a dish.