Ma-ma's Lockshen Pudding.
My favourite Jewish brown food-comfort food, because I'm trying to clear out my kitchen cupboards.
I’m currently embarking on a project to clear out all my cupboards, the (seemingly endless) jars section of the fridge, and my two freezers, and whilst I know I’ve got some seafood-heavy pasta recipes I’ve been meaning to try that call for egg vermicelli, what I really want to make with it is my Ma-ma’s Lockshen Pudding (Kugel for my American Jewish friends).
My Ma-ma, my maternal grandmother was a pretty basic cook, so only taught me a few basic Jewish dishes: namely wurscht and egg (slices of electric pink kosher beef salami dipped in egg and fried), fried fish in matzo meal, and lockshen pudding, a dish of spiced, baked pasta with dried fruit.
Lockshen Pudding was a treat she made for pudding when she visited, bringing with her treats from North London’s Jewish delis: vienna sausages (yet more electric pink kosher beef sausage product), kosher hot dogs, fried gefilte fish balls and pillowy poppy seed-topped challah for me, and rye bread (I still don’t like the caraway seeds it is traditionally studded with) and chopped herring (which as a child I always likened to cat sick for it’s slightly grey, textured, pasty appearance - a moniker so off-putting I’ve still not tried it over 20 years later even though I’m sure I’d actually like it) for my mother.
Lockshen Pudding was considered a treat because Ma-ma saw it as calorific, always one to be following a different diet. But I loved the soft, baked, sweetly spiced noodles hot from the oven or cold from the fridge, but I know for people who have not grown up with it pasta baked with margarine, eggs and sugar can be a confusing dish: I took a tray of it back from the holidays to boarding school and everyone refused to try it, except for another Jewish girl in the year below who helped me dig into it with gusto.
Lockshen (also spelt lokshen, locshen) is essentially the yiddish word for egg noodle, a staple of the Ashkenazi from our Eastern European homelands. This can refer to egg noodles of all thicknesses (all of which are staples in some Jewish chicken and matzo ball soups) but in our home, more British than full on practicing Jewish or Jewish American (who seem to have subtly different food traditions), we buy Sainsbury’s Egg Vermicelli, which are extra fine lockshen.
I originally shared Ma-ma’s Lockshen Pudding recipe in an article for Food52 way back in 2014 (enjoy the recipe comments section where some American readers take offence to how our British Jewish family translates Hebrew written and Yiddish spoken words into the Roman alphabet), as one of my first pieces of published food writing. It’s funny looking back at that article now, because I wrote the opening paragraph you’ve just read before I re-read the words of 2014 me again, and instinctively wrote almost the same words to introduce both Ma-ma and her recipe.
I then went on to discuss how the recipe is rooted in our family, which is important because there is another lockshen pudding recipe with my name on floating around out there, and there is one big, clear difference between the two:
The recipe came from Mama’s mother, my great-grandmother Rosa Chamberlist, who left school at the age of 12 to cook for her family. My mother remembers that her grandmother used mixed dried fruit in hers so that there was candied peel in it to suit her husband’s tastes. So while this recipe has always been slightly tweaked to suit the tastes of who is being fed, or the ingredients we could get at the time, our family's Lockshen has always had a pretty uniform taste.
A few years ago I wrote a recipe I believe partially to be an abomination: my Creamy Lokshen Pudding for BBC Food. It tastes good and I stand by my work, but not only have they spelt it the common way not Ma-ma’s way (transliteration happens), but it contains cream cheese and dairy products, something my family would not have been able to afford, hence why ours is made with margarine. To me, Lockshen Pudding should not contain creamy add-ins (it makes it too rich to properly load up on - what proper Jewish dish can’t be gorged upon??), but I had to come up with something different to what I’d already published, so there it was. Importantly, also, the margarine instead of butter distinction makes our lockshen pudding pareve, if you make sure you’re using a dairy-free margarine.
Below is Ma-ma’s Lockshen Pudding, not mine, because when confronted with all the leftover egg vermicelli from testing that BBC recipe, it’s all I wanted to eat on a rainy Monday afternoon.
Ma-ma’s Lockshen Pudding
Serves: 4-6 (this entirely depends on greed), Preparation time: 10 minutes, Cooking time: 35 minutes
I love the simplicity of this sweet noodle casserole: you heat the oven and cook the pasta whilst you mix the eggs and spices, before mixing it all together, pouring it into a buttered dish and baking. Leftovers are best warmed in the microwave (I like it for breakfast) unless like me you also find you enjoy it cold.
140g egg vermicelli
55g caster sugar
55g margarine1 , plus extra for buttering the dish
2 eggs
3/4 tsp mixed spice (Americans can use apple pie spice)
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
110g sultanas
Pre-heat the oven to 190C (fan) and butter a medium baking dish with margarine.
Cook the egg vermicelli as per the packets instructions, I find 5 minutes usually does it!
An example of Ma-ma’s ‘mush-mush’. In a large bowl, make a mush-mush out of the sugar, margarine, eggs, spices and sultanas - Ma-ma’s words, not mine! What she meant by this was mix them all together until the margarine has broken up and distributed itself into small lumps throughout the egg mixture.
Drain the vermicelli really, really well and mix with the egg mixture until everything is well coated.
Decant into the baking dish and bake for 30 minutes, until the top is golden.
Serve immediately.
You can use butter if you don’t buy margarine (do: it makes a better Victoria Sponge) but it does somewhat go against the spirit of our family recipe!
I really enjoyed reading about Ma-ma’s lockshen pudding and might give it a try. It reminds me a little of an Israel-style kugel called Yerushalmi kugel or Jerusalem kugel made from thin noodles, cooked sugar and oil, eggs, salt and a generous amount, of black pepper. It’s a far cry from the version with oodles of sour cream, cream cheese, raisins and often a cornflake topping that I grew up with, and that is still a big favorite at American Jewish holiday tables. I’ll admit I have a soft spot for it. But your version is very appealing, as is the Israeli dish. Thanks so much for sharing the recipe and the stories that go with it, Rachel. I’m now in great need of a kugel infusion.