Noodle Pudding? - Food That Time Forgot

0:00 I always find it interesting when we

0:01 have such a popular food [music] product today

0:05 that we have literally almost infinite choices

0:08 in and in the 18th century it was just introduced.

0:11 [music] Maybe there's a single solitary variety.

0:15 Today we're looking at pasta and the first kind

0:18 of pasta that gets introduced into English cookery and American cookery.

0:23 We're talking about vermicelli and I think

0:25 this is hilarious because today if you go

0:28 in the grocery store there's literally like 30 to 40 feet of pasta shelf, right?

0:34 There are a half a dozen brands, there are a million kinds of shapes.

0:38 They even make pasta out of mushrooms and out of like chickpeas and beans.

0:43 It's weird.

0:44 But almost none of them are labeled vermicelli,

0:48 which is the only kind you find in the 18th century.

0:51 So where do we get started with vermicelli?

0:53 [music] It's pasta coming from Italy.

0:56 We don't see it really in English

0:58 cookery even mentioned until [music] there's a dictionary

1:02 in about the year 1600 when they tell us about this idea of vermicelli.

1:08 I don't think it's actually in English cookery yet at all.

1:11 The first time we see it in cookbooks is in [music] Sir Kenelm

1:14 Digby's book and that's about 1669 and we have a reference to using vermicelli.

1:22 It also shows up in an early 18th century cookbook about I think 1717.

1:28 Again, they use it in a soup.

1:30 It's very simple and both of these books, The Closet Opened by Digby [music]

1:35 and this court cookery book, they are very very high-end cooking.

1:40 [music] And they're cooking French dishes or Italian dishes and that's why

1:43 we get this vermicelli being sort of [music] brought into English cookery.

1:49 I don't think it really hits the mainstream until we get to see

1:53 Eliza Smith's The Complete Housewife and that's about 1735 or so and 1740.

2:01 Early on she uses it in a soup and I think in an asparagus soup,

2:05 but then later on like I think it's in the 1740 [music] edition or so,

2:10 she uses it as a vermicelli pudding.

2:14 And that's what we're going to be making today.

2:15 First we're going to make vermicelli and then

2:18 we're going to make this amazing just killer pudding.

2:22 And I remember this pudding.

2:23 We did an episode 11 years ago on this pudding.

2:27 [music] I still remember the flavor of it and I haven't cooked it since.

2:30 So, you know it's good.

2:31 So, this vermicelli recipe alone is very easy.

2:35 It's very interesting because this vermicelli recipe doesn't happen

2:39 when Eliza Smith cooks it or these other cooks.

2:44 [music] It happens when Hannah Glass comes in another decade or so later.

2:47 And [music] Hannah Glass says, "Well,

2:50 actually this is probably after she sold her cookbook." So,

2:53 whoever updated her cookbook, we don't know who it is,

2:56 but they give us a vermicelli recipe and they say,

2:59 "You know it's better if you make it yourself because

3:02 the stuff you buy at the store that's imported, it's stale.

3:05 It doesn't taste good." [music] So,

3:07 they give us this recipe for the ultra simple, basically an egg noodle.

3:12 All we need are flour and egg yolks.

3:15 That's what we're going to be doing.

3:17 Right now, let's make some vermicelli.

3:18 Here's Hannah Glass's 1765 edition and let's read this recipe.

3:22 It's not huge and interestingly enough it could

3:26 be a much shorter, but here we go.

3:27 Mix the yolks of eggs and flour together

3:30 into a pretty stiff paste [music] so as you

3:33 can work it up cleverly and roll it as thin as possibly you can roll the paste,

3:39 let it dry in the sun.

3:40 When it is quite dry with a very sharp knife,

3:44 cut it as thin as possible and keep it in a dry place.

3:47 It will run up like a little worms as vermicelli does.

3:52 Though the best way is to run it

3:54 through a coarse sieve whilst the paste is soft.

3:58 If you want some to be made in haste, dry it by the fire and cut it small.

4:03 It will dry by the fire in a quarter of an hour.

4:06 This far exceeds what comes from abroad being [music] fresher.

4:11 This whole recipe is just wrong.

4:13 It is wrong.

4:14 I don't know why the directions are like this and I'm not

4:17 sure whether the person who wrote it actually had actually done it.

4:21 Because these are egg noodles.

4:23 All you really need to do is yes, make it up into the stiff paste [music]

4:27 and of course they don't give us any ratios at all.

4:29 You know, it's just like, "Well,

4:30 take some yolks and some flour and just make it." Okay, well,

4:34 we're going to do that and then roll it out as thin

4:37 as possible and then dry it [music] and then cut it.

4:39 I don't get that.

4:40 I don't I don't know how you dry it and then you cut it.

4:44 And then they're like, "Oh,

4:46 maybe you could make it by squeezing it through a sieve." Well,

4:50 I tried that and that is impossible.

4:52 It will not work like that.

4:54 Or at least I certainly couldn't [music] make it work.

4:56 No matter how soft the paste was, I could not get it to squeeze through

4:59 something into little worms and make the right thing.

5:02 When I prepared this, I used about a pound of flour, which is way too much.

5:06 We only need 5 oz of noodles for our recipe.

5:11 So, let's not make a whole pound of it.

5:13 Well, I'm going to start off with 8 oz of flour

5:16 here and my guess is we'll need about eight egg yolks.

5:21 It depends on how big your eggs are and how big the egg yolks are.

5:25 So, we're going to mix this up into the firm paste that she talks about.

5:28 Actually, this is fairly soft, but that's all right.

5:31 It's not going to make any real difference how stiff it is.

5:34 The fun part about a recipe like this is is so utterly

5:38 simple that is is a great [music] recipe to do with kids.

5:42 A lot of times kids want to get in there and do some

5:44 cooking and [music] making these noodles very fun and very easy to do,

5:51 and it makes a fun dish when you get done with it.

5:54 They have an interesting look to them.

5:56 It's fun they can make different shapes if they really want to.

5:59 So, I really suggest it.

6:01 I was [music] at Kalamazoo just the other day,

6:03 had a lot of different viewers come in, shake my hand, talk to me,

6:07 and multiple different families,

6:09 [music] and watching the kids interact with the videos

6:13 and be interested in cooking is always fascinating to me.

6:16 So, I really encourage you to get the kids in on a project like this.

6:19 It's a lot of fun.

6:21 I rolled this out pretty thin, and [music] now it's time to to cut this up.

6:25 Yes, this takes a while, but making food should take some time.

6:29 [music] We should take time and have fun making our food, have fun eating it.

6:33 The directions call for using a knife.

6:36 Now, if you're doing this with kids, I would suggest using a pizza cutter.

6:41 It's actually much easier than using a knife like these directions

6:45 but they didn't have pizza cutters in the 18th century,

6:47 so we're going to do it the old-fashioned way.

6:49 Since we don't need to use these in big long strips,

6:51 vermicelli's don't need to be very long.

6:53 We can just kind of bunch them onto our baking sheet.

6:57 You could try drying these in the sun.

6:59 I did mine in the oven like the directions say,

7:02 [music] and just put your oven at about 200,

7:05 and just leave them in there for about an hour.

7:07 They won't bake, they'll just dry out, and that's all we're looking for.

7:10 When you do bunch them up though like this, they will once you take them out,

7:15 they'll kind of break

7:18 [music]

7:17 into little pieces.

7:18 That's fine, works just fine.

7:21 My vermicelli is out of the oven,

7:24 and I've kind of broke it up into usable pieces here.

7:27 Now, we're going to use it in a classic recipe for the time [music] period.

7:33 One that isn't classic for us today.

7:35 Now, they did use this in soups and other ways,

7:38 mostly in soups, [music] but this vermicelli pudding is tremendous.

7:43 And it shows up again in the middle of the 18th century.

7:48 This version of it is in the Universal Cook by John Townson.

7:53 Not related, apparently, but maybe.

7:56 Maybe.

7:56 Here we go.

7:57 A vermicelli pudding.

7:59 Boil 5 oz of vermicelli in a quart of milk till it is tender

8:04 with a blade of mace and the rind of lemon or Seville orange or Seville orange.

8:11 Sweeten it to [music] your taste and add the yolks

8:13 of six or eight eggs and the whites of but of four.

8:19 In other words, you want to have twice as many yolks as you have just full eggs.

8:24 Have the dish ready covered with a paste just before you set it in your oven,

8:29 stir in a half a pound of melted butter, and a little salt does it.

8:35 If you have no peels, you can use a little orange flower water.

8:40 Again, very simple.

8:41 I've got some milk starting to heat up.

8:44 You have to be really careful.

8:45 He actually says to boil it in [music] milk.

8:49 We aren't going to boil it in milk.

8:51 Having milk continuously boil is not easy.

8:54 It'll burn, it'll scald, it'll taste bad.

8:56 We're not going to do that.

8:57 We're going to bring this milk [music] up

8:58 to temperature not to a very light simmer,

9:03 and then we're going to put in our 5 oz of vermicelli,

9:05 [music] and we're going to let it kind of steep and simmer.

9:08 We're not going to boil it.

9:10 I also added here some lemon zest and [music] a little bit of mace.

9:15 Yes, like all the 18th century recipes, this has a version of nutmeg in it.

9:20 Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg.

9:23 [music] It has a a little more bit

9:26 more gentle flavor than a typical nutmeg does.

9:29 If you don't have mace, just grind a little nutmeg in there.

9:33 As the recipe calls for, sweeten to taste.

9:35 I'm going to add maybe a half a cup of sugar to this.

9:40 It really depends on how much sweetness you want.

9:42 Our pudding is made in a pie crust.

9:45 So, let's make some pie [music] crust.

9:47 This is super simple and easy to do.

9:50 It doesn't have to be perfect.

9:51 It doesn't have to look like a store crust.

9:53 You can do this at home.

9:55 Let's do a 3 2 1 [music] recipe on this.

9:59 The ratio is three of flour, two of butter, and one of water.

10:05 Super easy to remember.

10:06 This pie crust does not need to be huge.

10:08 We just need one.

10:09 So, we've got 12 oz of flour.

10:12 I've got 8 oz of butter and about [music] 4 oz of water.

10:16 We take the flour in our bowl.

10:18 Let's add our butter and we want to rub this in.

10:24 [music] You're trying to get the cold butter to mix with the flour [music]

10:27 in as gentle a means as possible.

10:29 You don't want the butter to heat up.

10:31 So, I'm just grabbing this for a second and rubbing it in.

10:34 You can use other modern tools to get that done in a little easier manner.

10:39 But in the 18th century, you would rub [music] this butter in.

10:42 Once it's fully in there and crumbly, we can add in our 4 oz of water or so.

10:48 You can [music and clears throat] kind of sneak up on this.

10:49 So, try 2 oz of water, then to 3,

10:51 then to 4 until you get it into your pie crust stiffness.

10:57 Our pie crust is ready.

10:58 And the milk with the noodles, with the vermicelli, has cooked long enough.

11:04 Now, it's time to start to put this all

11:06 together so we can put it in the pie crust.

11:09 Now, the recipe here calls for the yolks of six

11:13 or eight eggs along with [music] like four whites.

11:16 So, we're going to go ahead and crack up some eggs here.

11:19 I'm going to put in four full eggs and add another four yolks.

11:25 And then, we can stir that into our our milk mixture.

11:29 Make sure the milk mixture is not too hot

11:32 or you will scramble your eggs and you don't want that.

11:35 We can temper this a little bit if we want and then mix them all together.

11:39 And once that's all together, we can pour into our pie crust.

11:43 Now, once it's in the pie crust,

11:45 interestingly, this recipe says at the very end,

11:48 just before you put it in the oven, add a half a pound of butter to this.

11:54 So, I think I'm going to mix in our melted

11:57 butter just before we pour it into our pie crust.

11:59 We don't want to mess up our pie crust.

12:01 So, then we can pour it into our pie crust.

12:03 After that, it's ready to go in the oven and this will take

12:08 approximately an hour to an hour and 15 minutes in your oven at 350°.

12:15 Our vermicelli pudding is out of the oven and I let this cool overnight.

12:20 It's set up really firmly.

12:22 That was the thing I worried about most.

12:23 When you put something like this in the oven,

12:25 you're worried that if it doesn't cook all the way,

12:27 it's going to stay liquidy and what that didn't happen at all.

12:31 In fact, I left mine in for an hour and 15 minutes just in case,

12:34 but it firmed up perfectly.

12:37 It came out in a nice beautiful looking slice here.

12:39 It smells tremendous, just like I remembered.

12:43 So, we can give this a try and we're going to take off a little bit here.

12:49 And you can tell it I mean, it really holds together really well.

12:52 Whoop.

12:56 Mhm.

12:57 Great flavors.

12:57 [music] We got a little bit of that mace in there.

13:00 I'm going to put a little bit more in and maybe even put some nutmeg on it.

13:04 It's got the right kind of a lemony flavor to it and of course,

13:08 it's wonderful and sweet and it has

13:10 all those wonderful textures of our vermicelli noodles.

13:14 So, this one turns out great.

13:16 I highly recommend it.

13:18 You might want to taste that batter even though it's

13:21 uncooked about whether or not you get enough sugar in it.

13:24 That's really the test.

13:26 They give us the you know, put as much as you want in it.

13:30 I probably could have put a little bit more in this one.

13:32 It would have been perfect.

13:33 If you're interested in more about pasta in the 18th century,

13:37 we have a whole episode where we make a pasta

13:39 press and we make some amazing pasta pieces in there.

13:43 So, make sure to check out this episode.