I was watching Townsend's Youtube channel and he was talking about "Hasty Puddings".
That brought back a memory that I thought was worth recording.
Background
My father's father's people were from just north of the Balkans and his mother's people were from just east of the Baltic. In spite of his origins, he tanned very, very quickly and was short and stocky.
His mother never heard a word of English until she went to school at the age of five in Allegan County, Michigan.
His mother was widowed when he was nine or ten and she was 33. That was in 1936. Times were tough.
When Dad was 18, he went to Detroit to register for the draft. It was during WWII and gas and tires were scarce. He hitchhiked since nobody in the family had a car.
A young man stopped and gave him a ride. That man was also going to register for the draft. They were both deferred (my dad because he was the sole support of a widow and Adam because he was born in Canada).
They became friends. Adam had a business and hired Dad. In time, Adam offered Dad the chance to purchase some swampland in Michigan that had a 12'-by-20' shack on it.
Fast-forward 25 years...
The shack was expanded as finances allowed. Cabinets and indoor plumbing was installed. It graduated from a "shack" to a "cottage".
Early one spring, I (and a spare brother or two) assisted Dad in opening up the "cottage" for the season. Time got away from us and there was nothing to eat. Dad solved the problem by dredging up memories of when he was a kid and the cupboard was bare. He made us something he called "Gleece".
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| An image from the internet. |
He mixed flour and eggs and maybe some water together to the consistency of pancake batter. Then he loaded up a large spoon with the batter and holding the bowl of the spoon just above the boiling water, he dribbled-and-drooled a stream of it into a pan of boiling water.
Half-hearted attempts to find a recipe met a stone-wall. I assumed it was just something he made up on-the-spot or it was something that only his family did.
God Bless the Internet
Guess what, "Gleece" is real.
Gleece/Glace
Ingredients for One Generous Serving
1 egg beaten
1/2 cup all purpose flour (not self rising)
1/4 cup (scant) water
Start with boiling salted water in a pot. Beat together ingredients and drop by small spoonfuls into the boiling salted water. Gleece are done when they rise to the top of the water. They do expand in size. Let them boil for an additional minute or two and then drain off the water.
Gleece can be used in chicken broth or green bean soup. They can also be fried with sliced potatoes (or boil your potatoes ahead of time and fry the boiled potato slices with the gleece). Season to your taste. They can be added to mashed potatoes and a little butter or put sour cream, butter and onion slivers on the boiled gleece.
Dad's versions were more icicle/round-noodle shaped than than dumpling-like. But the name is identical and the provenance matches.
Cheap. Quick. Simple. Easy. Very filling. Cheap.
I never heard of Gleece before. I wonder if adding some powdered cheese to the mix would enhance or render it inedible.
ReplyDeleteDon’t see why not, give it a try and report back. Basically, sorta, this is ‘dumplings’ with basic ingredients. Humankind has been doing something similar for tens to hundreds of thousands of years.
DeleteAlan E.
Another lost art from a time of self reliance. A good post for times that may be coming.---ken
ReplyDeleteIt;s a type of drop noodle. in various forms common in eastern european cuisines. my grandmother made something very similar, if not the same, but had a hungarian name for it
ReplyDeleteWe call this kneffle or spaetzles
ReplyDeleteMy family called something similar 'pibbles'. Leave out the water, drop small scoops from a spoon into a pot of potato soup. The extra starch helped the soup thicken, and the pibbles are really just egg noodles in drop form.
ReplyDeleteYes, just ate a pieces of turkey with spinach Spaetzle. Has a nice green colour and can be bought ready to eat.
ReplyDeleteWe grew up calling them 'rocks' or more appropriately some German variation of dumplings. Same recipe you mentioned, as such, came from German side of family that immigrated from Colmar region to N. Illinois in mid 1800s. Loved them, typically dropped into boiling chicken broth (from bullion). Dang, now I want some - guess I know what is for dinner. Great hearty cold weather rib-sticker.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like egg noodles, neat idea!
ReplyDeleteEggs would be such an important food to have in tough times. When my kids still lived at home I bought an incubator for them to hatch chicken, duck, and a few goose eggs. It got me to talking to older relatives and neighbors about how incubation was done in the Olden Days. Most said: "We bought chicks at the elevator".
ReplyDeleteSo I researched the topic. The best method seems to be putting a single hen with bedding and a few fertile eggs into a confined "pot" ( think: canning pressure-cooker size) with a wire mesh secured lid to force her to lay on them for incubation. You feed and water daily, but a small % of hens will refuse the incarceration.
We've become so "advanced" that we forgot how to hatch chicks without modern technology. Sad panda.
I will also admit that the best success we ever had with hatching eggs was when a single Muscovey duck laid 14 eggs under a shed and hatched them all, unbeknownst to us until we saw them!
Unfortunately, in the effort to make hens produce more eggs, the brooding instinct has been bred out of them, for the most part. Even hens that are more prone to brooding, Orpingtons, for instance, tend to brood but move from nesting box to nesting box. They won't set on one clutch of eggs long enough to finish the job. On top of that, if you incubate your own, there's a better than 50% chance that the hatchling will be a rooster. Better and often cheaper to buy chicks at the feed store, as chances are, they've already been sexed. Beware of "straight-run" chicks. They haven't been sexed, so as in home incubation, there's a better than 50% chance that each chick will be a rooster...
DeleteMy parents talked of a time - late 19th century, I think - when local farm servants wouldn't agree to work for a new employer unless he promised to feed them salmon fewer than three times a week.
ReplyDeleteBy my boyhood salmon had become looked on as rather a luxury.
'Same thing happened in New England, only the offensive food there was... LOBSTER!
DeleteMy fathers family (Hungarian) would make these noodles that way exactly. It was typically eaten with chicken paprikash, or other pan made meal... Fond memories, good food.
ReplyDeleteMy mother called it spetzle. It was wonderful in soup like chicken or beef when noodles were forgotten in the grocery run. Fond memories.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother was from Czechoslovakia. She made these things, but they were kinda spoon-shaped. We called them "Glops" because you took a glop of the batter on a spoon and put it into the boiling water.
ReplyDelete