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Nudeln with Cream
Half pound sifted flour, one cup milk, two ounces butter, three eggs, one saltspoon slat and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Place all the above in a basin, then briskly stir with a wooden spoon until a firm, clear paste without grains. Lightly flour a corner of the table, drop the paste over it and let dry for ten minutes. Divide into four equal parts, then with a pastry roller roll out each piece as thin as you possibly can. Let dry again for fifteen minutes. Then cut into two-inch lozenge-shaped pieces. Have two quarts boiling water in a pan with a teaspoon slat; plunge in your nodal and boil six minutes, or till very tender. Remove with a skimmer, drain thoroughly. Place on a hot dish, spread a tablespoon fresh butter over them and serve with cream (cold) or milk.
A plain German-Austrian egg noodle, made from scratch and dressed with nothing but butter and cold cream. The typesetting in this edition is rough — "slat" is salt and "nodal" is noodle — and the liquid quantity needs judgment.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Two of them here means roughly 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg total.
- The flour-to-liquid ratio is offHalf a pound of flour (about 1 3/4 cups) with a full cup of milk plus three eggs gives a loose batter, not the "firm, clear paste" the recipe demands. Treat the milk as an upper limit: start with a few tablespoons, add eggs, and work in only as much liquid as the flour will take while staying stiff enough to roll. Expect to need considerably more flour than half a pound if you use the full cup of milk.
- Kneading matters more than stirringA wooden spoon will not develop the dough. Once it comes together, knead it by hand for 8-10 minutes until smooth and elastic — that is what produces the "clear paste without grains" and keeps the noodles from disintegrating in the water.
- The two restsThe ten-minute rest before rolling relaxes the gluten and is worth extending to 30 minutes under a cloth; the dough will roll thinner with far less effort. The fifteen-minute rest after rolling is a surface dry, not a full dry — the sheets should feel leathery, not brittle.
- Boiling timeSix minutes suits noodles rolled thick or dried hard. Fresh sheets rolled genuinely thin cook in 2-3 minutes; start testing at two. "Till very tender" is the real instruction, and overcooked egg noodles turn slack and gummy.
- Use more waterTwo quarts for a half-pound of flour is tight for noodles that shed starch. Four quarts, well salted, keeps them from sticking to each other as they go in.
- LozengesStack the floured sheets, cut into two-inch strips, then cut across on the diagonal to make diamonds. Toss the cut pieces in flour so they do not fuse before they reach the pot.
- ServingThis would make roughly four servings as a side dish. The cold cream poured over hot buttered noodles appears deliberate; with the nutmeg the dish sits somewhere between a savory side and a sweet supper dish, though the recipe adds no sugar.
Nudeln is simply the German word for noodles, and the recipe here resembles the domestic Austrian and southern German everyday versions: flour, egg, a little dairy, nutmeg, cut into Fleckerl-style squares or diamonds rather than long ribbons. The origin of the word Nudel itself is unsettled; it is often linked to Knödel (dumpling) or to a root meaning a small lump or knot, but no derivation is firmly documented. Nutmeg with egg noodles is a persistent central-European habit, and serving them hot with cold cream or milk poured over belongs to a broad family of Mitteleuropean flour dishes that sit ambiguously between side dish and sweet — the same logic that produces buttered noodles with poppy seed, with ground walnuts, or with sugared curd.