German Noodles

There was a moment of panic this week. I went through my recipe file box and couldn't find my Grandma's recipe for homemade noodles. It still isn't there, but I calmed down and remembered what she taught me and rewrote it. Eventually, I'll find it stuck between a couple of other recipes or flat underneath the whole shebang, but at least I know how to do it.

The noodles (I'll put the recipe below in case anyone is interested) are important to me, not just because I love the taste and they remind me of special family dinners since I was a tiny child, but because they run in my family something like mitochondrial DNA. That is, the recipe came to my mother and then to me from my maternal grandmother, who got them from her mother, who got them from her mother, and so forth.

I know my direct maternal great-great-great grandmother Elisabetha Schaub Yockey died when her daughter (my 2-great, Lizzie) was only 3 years old, so Lizzie didn't get the noodlemaking lesson from her mother. But I also know that Lizzie knew her maternal grandmother (who came over from Germany, bringing the recipe in her head) and both of her mother's sisters well, and was cooking and helping to care for her younger half-sibs while still quite young. Doubtless, the noodlemaking lesson came from a visit with her grandmother or aunts.

Like the mitochondrial DNA, that noodle recipe wasn't lost just because of an early loss of a generation (so long as that generation has already reproduced!). It goes back up the maternal line until it is lost from sight in the dim mists of time. I can just see Eve saying to Adam, "Well, I've made up a new recipe. Try it and see what you think." He must have told her it was a keeper.

So when my daughter asks, I'm going to teach her like my grandma taught me.

I'm going to plop a stewing chicken in a big pot of water and boil it. While it boils, I'm going to get out a large bowl, scoop out about 2 cups of flour into the bowl ("about this much flour, more or less"), sprinkle a little salt over it ("a good pinch"), hollow out a hole in the top of the flour, crack a large egg into the hole, then take half the eggshell and fill it with milk, dribbling it in with the egg. Then I'm going to take off my rings, put my hands in, and say,

"Mix it until it looks and feels about like this. If it needs more liquid, dribble a little water or more milk in, in order to gather up the flour on the sides of the bowl. Form it into a ball and knead it a couple times. Let it rest a couple minutes. Then flour the counter and the rolling pin, and roll it until it is this thick. [Call it 1/8 inch or a little thinner.]

"Then cut it into rectangles about this size. [4 inches by 6 or 7 inches.]

"Flour between the rectangles and stack them, then use a sharp knife and cut them across the short way, very very fine, about this wide. [Another 1/8 inch.] Be careful to keep your fingertips and fingernails out of the way of the knife!

"Then shake them apart and spread them on a clean dish towel on the kitchen table and let them dry about an hour or two. Read a magazine or cook your side dishes, or something--maybe go up and do your hair so you look nice when your husband gets home. You can make the noodles a day ahead of time and let them dry on the kitchen table overnight if you want.

"After a while, take the chicken out of the pot--it should be so tender it's falling off the bones by now--and pull it apart. Take enough of the broth out to make a good gravy and thicken it with a mix of flour and cornstarch and a little milk. And there's your main dish, stewed chicken with gravy.

"Then, with the remaining broth at a good rolling boil, drop in the dried noodles a few at a time. Keep the broth at a boil the whole time you are adding noodles, or the noodles will be 'green'. You can add a little water at a time if too much boils away but don't add too much at once or you'll bring it down from the boil. [For those of you who don't have funny "Dutchy" little German grandmas, "green" means gummy, rubbery, raw tasting.] Boil them until they are tender but not too limp.

"At the end, you'll have boiled most of the water out of the broth, but if it's still too liquid, add a little flour and stir it real good. You end up with a good pot of noodles in gravy, and you can put them in a pretty serving bowl and set them on the table."

Now, I'll admit, my husband had better not be paying any attention to whether I've "done my hair" for him, if I go to this much trouble cooking, because I guarantee I haven't. But Grandma recommended it, so I 'll include the suggestion too. I expect my daughter won't make the noodles very often, but I hope she will decide to throw together a batch once in a while, just for the sake of the emotional DNA.