Noodle Ring Day

What the day is

Noodle Ring Day is observed on December 11. The name sounds like nonsense and in fact describes a real dish that was once a fixture of American home cooking.

Origin and background

A noodle ring is cooked noodles bound with eggs, cheese or a white sauce, packed into a ring mold, baked until set and turned out onto a platter. The hollow center is then filled, usually with something creamed: chicken, mushrooms, peas, dried beef or seafood.

It belongs to the long era of molded cooking that ran through American kitchens from around the turn of the twentieth century into the 1960s, alongside timbales, aspics and the gelatin salads the period now gets mocked for. A ring mold was ordinary equipment rather than a novelty.

There were practical reasons for the shape. A ring cooks far more evenly than a solid block, because heat reaches the middle from both sides and there is no dense cold center to compensate for. It also solves a presentation problem, since the sauce that would otherwise pool around a casserole sits in the middle instead and holds its heat there.

The dish has relatives with better reputations. Jewish noodle kugel works on the same principle of eggs setting noodles into something sliceable, and the Italian timballo does a more ambitious version of the same trick. The noodle ring is the plain American cousin of both.

It faded once serving turned casual and food no longer needed to be turned out of anything. It now reads as thoroughly retro, but the technique still works exactly as well as it did.

How to take part

• Make one. A tube pan or bundt pan does the job perfectly well if you have no ring mold.
• Grease the mold thoroughly and let it rest before turning out, or it will not release cleanly.
• Use a filling thick enough to stay in the middle rather than running across the platter.
• Make kugel instead if you want the same idea with a longer tradition behind it.
• Bring it to the table whole. The presentation is the entire reason for the shape.