Homemade Egg Noodles

Credit: André Baranowski

Egg noodles almost always come to the table with roasts and stews in Poland, where my parents came from, and it was the same in our house when I was growing up in Atlanta, Georgia. Even though my father carried all kinds of packaged noodles and pastas in his grocery store, my mother always made her noodles by hand. I used to climb up on a stool to watch her as she measured the flour into a bowl, made a well in the middle, and cracked the eggs. I liked to watch the flip of her wrist when she scattered drops of cold water into the dough before she kneaded it on her big wooden board, and I loved to help her flatten the dough and cut it into broad strips that would become the noodles for her chicken soup or braised brisket. Making the noodles didn't take as long as you might think, but long enough for Mama to tell me tales about her life, about hard times when she was growing up, when her own mother kept her seven children happy and well with nothing but homemade noodles and garden-grown vegetables. I inherited my mother's dough board and her rolling pin, and I used them when I taught my own children to make noodles. Now my grandchildren beg their parents to make noodles, too. —Jeannette Lander, Mühlenberge-Senzke, Germany