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Noodle Pudding
1 pint noodles 3/4 cupful sugar 4 eggs 1/4 cupful melted Crisco 1/4 cupful blanched and chopped almonds 2 cupfuls milk 1/4 teaspoonful salt Throw noodles into boiling salted water, and cook five minutes. Drain in colander. Beat eggs until light and stir in the noodles. Grease pudding dish with Crisco, put in layer of noodles, sprinkle with sugar, almonds, grated lemon peel, and melted Crisco. Then add another layer of Puddings noodles and proceed as before, until all are used up. Add milk and salt, and bake one hour in moderate oven. Serve hot with milk or cream. This pudding is delicious with stewed fruits. 1 quart flour
A baked noodle custard in the kugel family, written for the 1913 Crisco kitchen. Two small editorial problems in the original text are worth sorting out before you start.
- The stray line"1 quart flour" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the book, and the word "Puddings" mid-paragraph is a running page header that crept into the text. Ignore both.
- Lemon peelGrated lemon peel appears in the method but not in the ingredient list. Reckon on the zest of one lemon, added with the sugar and almonds.
- A pint of noodlesMeasured dry by volume, a pint is roughly 4 oz (110 g) of fine egg noodles. This is a custard held together by noodles, not a noodle dish with custard, so resist adding more.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). The pudding is done when the custard is set at the centre and barely trembles; an hour is about right in a dish 2 inches deep, longer in a deeper one.
- Five minutes in boiling waterThe noodles finish cooking in the milk, so parboil them only until pliable. Modern dried egg noodles may need only three to four minutes.
- CriscoThen a novel all-vegetable shortening, sold hard to home bakers as a butter and lard substitute. Melted butter gives a better flavour here; a neutral oil will also serve.
- Blanched almondsBuy them blanched and slivered, or pour boiling water over whole almonds, stand a minute, and slip the skins off. Chop coarsely so they stay distinct in the custard.
- Order of assemblyThe eggs are beaten into the noodles first and the milk poured over at the end. Let the assembled dish stand ten minutes before baking so the milk soaks in evenly.
- YieldSix modest servings from a 1 1/2-quart dish. Serve hot, as directed, with cream or stewed fruit; it reheats well but the top loses its crispness.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product nobody had asked for: a solid white shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced two years earlier. Much of the book is ordinary domestic cookery with Crisco substituted wherever butter or lard would have stood, and this noodle pudding is a good example -- it is recognisably a sweet kugel, the baked noodle pudding of Central and Eastern European Jewish kitchens, carried to the United States by immigrants in the decades either side of 1900. Crisco was marketed with some energy to Jewish households precisely because, being neither meat nor dairy, it sidestepped the kashrut problem of lard and of butter at a meat meal; the company's later Yiddish-English recipe booklets made that pitch explicit. Here the milk in the custard makes the dish plainly dairy, so the shortening is doing nothing ritual -- it is simply the house ingredient, appearing in the greased dish, the layers and the ingredient list, as it does on nearly every page.