But let's get down to business.
Are you ready to be let on on a secret? Something that has been kept within my family for generations? Come on, everyone loves a good secret recipe, kept on stained index cards and battered notebooks for generations, given loving tweaks each decade. It is time for you, dear reader, to enter the world of the Noodles.
Noodles have been a part of my holiday meals since as long as I could remember. They're so ingrained in my family's culinary workings that I'm not even sure which side they were passed down from (I have a suspicion it's the half that's from western Pennsylvania, because there's something suspiciously Amish about the whole rigamarole). Every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, they are the part of the meal I look forward to the most, and my favorite leftover; they're what neighbors and friends beg to try, and what the unintiated are foolishly suspicious of. If they're so wonderful, you might ask, why not make them more than twice a year? Ah, read on, and you shall see.
But let's get down to brass tacks: the ingredients for these noodles.
12 egg yolks
6 tbs melted butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
Just simple egg noodles is all they are. This Thankgiving, when I supped away from home (and with the Ladies), it fell to me to make the noodles all by myself for the first time in my life. I had family honor riding on this. If I failed, I could never go home again, and would live my life in shame.
On the day before Thanksgiving, I began by separating all of the yolks from the whites, in a long and messy process that I screwed up at least once, by distractedly dumping the separated yolk directly into the tub of egg whites. Shame upon my family! Twelve egg yolks in a bowl, all pressing against each other but staying in their own little cellular worlds, are sort of beautiful. But it cannot last!
I first became convinced that I had ruined the noodles, shamed my family, and entirely ruined Thanksgiving for everyone roughly ten seconds after I dumped the butter that I had melted in the microwave into the eggs. "Oh no," I thought. "How hot was that? Is that going to scramble the eggs?" I mixed everything together with a fork, whimpering in vague terror at any lumps and wondering if anyone would notice if I just dumped out an entire dozen's worth of eggs and started over. Shame upon my family! Fortunately for all, the butter was not hot enough to cause any damage. But, to save the honor of my family, should you try this, I'd suggest a slow addition of the butter.
Once the cream, salt, and baking powder were mixed in, I began the hard part: adding those four cups of flour, 1/2 cup at a time. I went at it with my tiny fork until it seemed like a mere utensil was no longer man enough for the job. At about two cups mixed in, I thought perhaps it would be safe to switch to a more manual method, and stuck my little hand in there... and was rewarded with a big ol' mess of club hand. Shame upon my family! I tormented Stephen a little bit with it before washing my hand of and going back to a method of struggling to get that massive amount of dry into that tiny amount of wet with fork and spatula.
Finally the mixture had become solid and doughy enough to require me to really get in there and work the flour directly in with my hands. I tell you, I nearly killed myself kneading and kneading and kneading, and had visions of grandmothers and great grandmothers and sturdy Pennsylvania Dutch women with hefty forearms. "You can do it, Whitney!" the visions said to me. "Don't bring shame upon your family!" I wiped the sweat from my brow with a now Popeye-like forearm and beat the crap out of that dough.
I was rewarded for all of this effort, after about thirty minutes of intense, exhausting kneading (I eventually broke the dough into two halves to make it easier on my tired hands, and also to facilitate rolling) with a big ol' wad of shiny yellow dough. I looked at it and felt for the first time in the process that I was doing this all right, that I was not shaming my family. I took Martha's (vaguely underpowered, if I may say; I'm used to a heavy-duty marble pin) rolling pin and rolled the dough out on a floured table until it was about 1/8-1/4 inch in thickness, and then used a pizza cutter (many years of trial and error with paring knives, noodle cutters, and other apparati have revealed the pizza cutter to be the best tool for this task) to slice the dough into noodles of varying widths, each about an inch to an inch and a half in length.
The end product looks a little bit like french fries. I spread them out on cookie sheets and wax paper to dry out and harden overnight. Honestly, I don't know why this is a vital step in the noodle process, but it just is. Also, out of habit, I covered them with wax paper. This is entirely unnecessary, but in my household, the noodle making ritual is never complete without the dance of Oh God Keep The Cat From Sitting On The Noodles.
I was safely able to forget about the noodles until Thanksgiving itself, about 45-30 minutes before when the bird comes out of the oven--game time, as it were. Cooking the noodles is a bit of last minute artistry, and the noodles being done has almost always been the signal for the feasting to begin.
I began by bringing to a boil in a large pot an... uncertain amount of turkey stock. I had made many calls home to get some exact information on how to cook the noodles, but reports were vague. All I knew is that they had to be boiled in some form of stock or broth (our usual version involve store-bought chicken broth). Martha had fortunately made a ridiculous amount of turkey stock earlier that week (much of which I had thawed in the shower earlier), so we threw some in the pot and got it hot. When it started to bubble, the noodles went in. My brother had advised about an inch of liquid over the noodles, and our starting amount turned out to be perfect.
Then the stirring began. The noodles require nearly constant stirring as they cook and thicken the liquid around them. Fortunately my forearms were strong from the kneading the previous day, and I had many helpful assistants willing to have a claim that they helped cook the noodles. If the liquid had reduced almost entirely and the noodles were still a little too chewy and not quite cooked, I could have safely added more broth, but I lucked out. My ancestors were smiling at me. Now it came time for the secret touch, the reason the noodles are twice-a-year delicacies... the turkey juice.
Straight from the pan the turkey roasted in into the noodle pot, enough juice as you think you can spare without making the whole cauldron too greasy. This is another place where measurements are too mundane, where it all falls to magic and genetic instinct. Since my family has started brining and roasting our turkeys, we've gotten more amounts of incredibly flavorful juice. Thank you, Alton Brown, for making our family recipe even better.
The final result is just a little chewy, with the stock and juice reduced to a very thick gravy. Tasting is definitely required, because depending on the quality of the stock and juice, you may need to add some salt (rarely a problem with store-bought broth, but Martha's was not naturally sodium-heavy.) The noodles are fine eaten on their own, or on top of mashed potatoes, or smothered with turkey gravy, or even cold out of a tupperware container at midnight.
The noodles were loved by all. I had succeeded in an important right of passage. I had not shamed my family. And, most importantly of all, I got to EAT THE NOODLES! Now I just begin the countdown until Christmas dinner...
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