Passing the torch

    I don't know about you but when this time of year rolls around my memories are settled right in my taste buds.  While growing up I took for granted that the traditional food we had only at holiday time would always be there because it WAS always there.  Until it wasn't.  There was a mad dash of phone calls and letters to relatives and siblings, "Do you remember how Busia made the placzek?" "Did anyone get Peg's brownie recipe?" "How about her spaghetti sauce?" "Do you know how to make Aunt Marcella's ketchup?"  "Did you get Aunt Marcella's chocolate cake recipe??"  "Who knows how to make Louie's noodles?"  Anyone? Anyone???  No sense asking the non-cooks in the family, they were no help.  Sometimes we were lucky and someone did have the recipe but sometimes it was a journey. Old cookbooks, trial and error, things finally came together.  When you are dealing with Old World cooks you didn't get measurements, you got hands full and tea cups and pinches and "feels like" and cook it till it's "thick thin."
     One thing PH's family always had on the table for holidays and get togethers was home made noodles. Like religion and spaghetti sauce, the noodles came with their own personal interpretation and depending on which family you grew up in, now their interpretation became yours.

    From the left, PH's mother in stripes, then Aunt Celeste and Aunt Marcella.  These women were born and bred German, can you tell by looking at those hands?  Many a noodle passed through those hands and as each woman plonked her pot on the potluck table, everyone knew whose was whose just by looking at them.  The matriarchs are gone now, but the noodles live on.  Aunt Marcella's grandson is in charge of his family getting her noodles,  and my daughter is in charge of PH's mother's noodles. 

 Elizabeth and Adelaide are now pros. Mom doesn't even have to be in the room or even in the house anymore.  From the time Elizabeth was 7 months old she sat at the table and watched.   Now mixing the dough, getting "the feel" and taking the procedure to completion is second nature to the girls.

 While PH's mother rolled her noodles out by hand (ugh!) the noodle press has greatly simplified the hard work. 

 This year I even got in on the process.  Can you believe I've never made them?  But I never had to.  The torch was passed from grandma to granddaughter and now great granddaughters.

We made two double batches.  Twenty four eggs, countless cups of flour.   There is now enough for Thanksgiving, leftovers for PH and Christmas.   The thing is, the grands love eating them raw, dried but not cooked.  By the bowlful!  Of all things - they don't eat them once they are cooked.  So the ones you see lying on the table are for them.
Raw eggs you say?   Alton Brown says, "get over it."