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Noodles with Butter
Plunge one pound noodles into two quarts boiling salted water and cook for fifteen minutes. Drain well, replace in the same pan, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, adding one ounce good butter. Gently mix, without breaking the noodles, until the butter is thoroughly dissolved and serve.
A plain buttered-noodle recipe of the sort that once served as a standard side dish for braised meats. Two figures need adjusting: the boiling time and the water.
- Fifteen minutes is too longFifteen minutes is too long for modern noodles -- commercial dried egg noodles today cook in 6 to 9 minutes, and fresh ones in 2 to 4. The longer boil may reflect thicker or drier noodles than we buy now; applied to a modern bag it produces mush that will break when you toss it. Taste at the low end of the package time.
- More waterTwo quarts for a full pound is tight and will boil down starchy and sticky. Four quarts gives the noodles room and keeps them from clumping while they drain.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is usually reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, which would make two of them half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive for a pound of noodles; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern taste. White pepper may have been chosen so that no dark flecks show in the dish.
- One ounce of butterTwo tablespoons for a pound of noodles is a lean dressing by current standards. It works best if the noodles go back into a hot pan still slightly wet; the recipe has them drained well and replaced in the same pan, with no rinsing mentioned.
- Salting the waterThe original leaves the amount of salt in the cooking water unstated, then seasons again at the end. About a tablespoon of salt in four quarts is standard; if you salt the water properly, the half teaspoon added afterward may be more than you want.
- Handling"Gently mix, without breaking the noodles" is the whole technique. Use a fork or tongs and lift rather than stir, and keep the pan over the lowest possible heat only until the butter coats everything.
- YieldA pound of noodles feeds six to eight as a side dish, four as a main with something spooned over it.
Buttered noodles occupy a section of the old international cookbooks reserved for the German, Austrian and Alsatian repertoire, where Nudeln — flour and egg rolled thin, dried on a cloth, and cut into ribbons — were a household staple long before commercial pasta was widely sold in America. In grand-hotel kitchens of the early twentieth century, noodles in butter were a workhorse garnish, sent out beside braised beef, goulash, game and boiled fowl, and the instruction to season with white rather than black pepper is often read as a tell: the dish may have been meant to look uniformly pale on the plate. Egg noodles reached most American kitchens through Central European immigration, and the dried packaged sort — which is what makes the fifteen-minute boil obsolete — became common only as commercial production expanded through the twentieth century.