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Noodles with Brown Butter
Prepare the same quantity of noodles plunge in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt and boil for thirty-five minutes. Drain on a sieve, then place on a dish, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper and mix well with the seasoning. Place an ounce butter in a frying pan, toss it on the fire until of a nice brown colour, then pour over the noodles and serve.
A two-ingredient dish that lives or dies on the butter, and on ignoring the original cooking time.
- The thirty-five minutesThis is the one instruction to disregard. Even the thick homemade egg noodles this book assumes are done in 8 to 12 minutes; dried commercial egg noodles need 6 to 8, fresh ones 3 to 4. Boiled for thirty-five they collapse into paste.
- "The same quantity"The recipe follows on from a preceding noodle recipe in the book, so no weight is given here. Reckon on about 8 oz of dried egg noodles or 12 oz fresh, which two quarts of water will handle comfortably.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is a half teaspoon — assertive but correct for this dish, where pepper is the only other flavour.
- Brown the butter properly"Toss it on the fire until of a nice brown colour" means beurre noisette: melt over medium heat, let the foam subside, and swirl until the milk solids at the bottom turn hazelnut brown and the smell turns nutty. It goes from brown to burnt in under a minute, so pour it out the moment it is there.
- More butterOne ounce is two tablespoons, which barely coats a half pound of noodles. Two to three ounces gives the dish the gloss it is aiming for, and browning a larger amount is easier to judge.
- DrainingDrain but do not rinse, and dress the noodles while hot so the seasoning clings. A spoonful of the cooking water loosens things if they tighten up on the serving dish.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish, two as a supper. It wants something sharp alongside — a braise with its juices, or a green salad.
Noodles tossed in browned butter are often associated with the German and Central European kitchens that fed much of America's late nineteenth-century immigration, though they are by no means exclusively Central European, and the dish travels under many names — Butternudeln in Germany and Austria, and a close relative of the buttered noodles that accompany paprika stews and boiled beef across Hungary and Bohemia. Its place in The International Cook Book reflects the ambition of the big polyglot cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s: a professional chef cataloguing the national dishes his American readers were beginning to encounter in restaurants and in their neighbours' houses. The long boiling time may be less carelessness than a period habit — pasta and noodles were often cooked to complete softness in Anglo-American kitchens, and the taste for firmness is generally said to have come later.