Noodles Written 9/07

NOODLES

My mother thought noodles were junk food – no nutrition, unless of course they were egg noodles, the supreme noodle – “only one worth eating”. How is it that my German mother made such delicious chicken noodle soup with egg noodles? She didn’t learn it from Grandma Buttenhoff. Grandma only used water in her cooking because, mother said, she was too poor to use eggs. The precious eggs from their own chickens were sold to neighbors in order to buy the flour for Grandma's water noodles.

The 11 children were skin and bones, my mother said, because grandma and grandpa didn’t know better than to have so many kids. "You can’t raise healthy children on water noodles." Its true, Ardis died at 14 of pneumonia. So now there were only 10. Perhaps if the noodles had been more substantial she might have lived. Perhaps if grandpa had not forced himself on grandma so many nights with all the children listening... perhaps if the oldest, Edna, had not come home from school excited to tell her mother that there is a way to stop having so many babies... perhaps if she would not have been slapped in the face, hard... perhaps if they had listened and learned...the family noodles would have been more substantial, the daughter Edna, not quite so angry, I, her daughter, not so tired of hearing of the benefits of substantial noodles.