food & dining
These Passover Pancake Noodles
Are Better Than Matzah Balls
LIZ SUSMAN KARP AND
NATALIE GORLIN | JTA.ORG
L ast April, as the pandemic raged
in my area, I opened my front
door to my dear friend Natalie,
who literally threw at me from a dis-
tance a plastic sandwich bag contain-
ing her family’s cherished Passover
tradition: flädla.

Less commonly known than the
universally beloved matzah ball, these
Passover egg noodles are made from
a thin crepe that’s coiled and cut into
strips, over which steaming broth is
poured. Natalie’s family recipe was
handed down from her mother’s tante
Ilse, who emigrated from Germany in
1939 post-Kristallnacht.

Ask around about flädla and, like the
history of any good noodle, you’ll dis-
of Survival,” illustrating how deeply
ingrained the dish was in people’s mem-
ories. Sometimes called lokshen, the
Yiddish word for noodle, the recipes use
matzah meal or potato starch, and always
the same method of frying a thin crepe
and cutting it into strips.

Pinpointing when, where, or who first
adapted these noodle ribbons for the
holiday is a challenge. “What is most fas-
cinating to me,” says Gaby Rossmer, coau-
thor with her daughter, Sonya Gropman,
of “The German-Jewish Cookbook,” “is
how these food traditions travel. They do
follow routes. You can see it, but you can’t
tell exactly which one came first, which
came second.”
Many Jews, like Natalie’s ances-
tors and Rossmer, lived in southern
Germany; in the Swabian region, pan-
cakes are known as flädle. The recipe
has been handed down over gener-
cover the topic covers a lot of ground.

Flädla, also spelled flädle, didn’t start
off as a Passover food, but evolved into
a dish that reflects the ingenuity and
frugality of Jewish Eastern European
cooks, who repurposed leftover dough
or pancakes into noodles.

Noodles were a significant part of
the Ashkenazi diet. In medieval times,
Europeans began boiling dough in
water rather than baking or frying it.

In the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,”
Gil Marks writes that noodles were
predominantly used in soup and that
some cooks cut up matzah meal blin-
tzes into the liquid. No name was
ascribed to that noodle or dish.

Recipes for Passover noodles are
included in numerous Jewish cookbooks,
notably June Feiss Hersh’s compilation of
recipes from Holocaust survivors titled,
“Recipes Remembered: A Celebration
ations; tradition dictates the crepes
be thin and crispy. Flädlesuppe was a
popular dish, but “never for Passover,”
says Rossmer. She was a year old when
she came to America from Bavaria, but
fondly remembers frequently frying
flour crepes with her father; the goal
was always to have enough left over to
make flädlesuppe.

The noodles are a key component
of a comparable, popular Austrian
soup called frittatensuppe, or pancake
soup, which is always made with beef
broth, says Nino Shaye Weiss, a blog-
ger at JewishVienneseFood.com and
Jewish food guide in Vienna. There,
the crepes are called palatschinken;
cut up they’re referred to as frittaten.

“Jews do seemingly love them as they
cannot live the eight days of Passover
without them,” he comments, adding
that frittaten for Passover are simply
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Getty Images via JTA.org
known as Peisachdike lokshen (kosher
for Passover noodles).

Legend has it that frittatensuppe may
have originated in 19th century Austria
to feed Austrian, French and Italian
diplomats secretly meeting during the
Congress of Vienna. One participant
was Conte Romano de Frittata, whose
coachman prepared the pancake.

Frittata comes from the Italian word
friggere, to fry; perhaps suggesting that
the dish was named aft er the coach-
man’s employer. However, the only
similar Italian-Jewish recipe I could
fi nd was for Minestra di Sfoglietti Per
Pesach, a soup containing noodles of
baked dough, in Th e Classic Cuisine of
the Italian Jews by Edda Servi Machlin.

If the story is true, the dish did not
make its way back to Italy.

Holocaust survivor Cecile Gruer, 86,
is known as her family’s chef. She mov-
ingly recalls eating fl ädla in 1946 at the
fi rst Passover she celebrated with her
family in an Austrian displaced persons
camp aft er they were reunited. Th en a
teen, she watched her mother prepare
the noodle as her mother had done in
Hungary. Greuer makes fl ädla year-
round, using potato starch, matzah
meal or quinoa or almond fl our for
gluten-free relatives. Sometimes she’ll
just mix egg and water, essentially
an omelette. Gruer suggests adding
any herb, such as dill or cilantro, to
heighten the soup’s fl avor. She contin-
ues these traditions because, she says,
“You do not want to break the chain.”
Gruer’s and Natalie’s families enjoy
their fl ädla in chicken broth with
matzah balls. Th e Lubavitch sect, who
follow the custom of gebrokts and don’t
eat any dish where matzah can touch
liquid, have just the noodle in their
soup, says Leah Koenig, author of “Th e
Jewish Cookbook.” Gruer confi des she
doesn’t like chicken soup. How does
she eat her fl ädla? She laughs. “I would
LEGAL DIRECTORY
have it on the plate!”
Ingredients 4 eggs, separated
¾ teaspoon salt
¼-½ cup (to taste) chopped
chives 4 tablespoons potato starch
¼ cup of chicken broth
oil Separate the eggs and add the
salt to the yolks.

Mix chives and potato starch
in with the egg yolks. Add as much
chicken broth as is necessary for
the mixture to be the consistency of
pancake batter.

Beat egg whites until stiff and
add to yolk mixture (mix occasion-
ally while cooking batches to avoid
separation). Heat a small amount of oil in a
frying pan and add enough batter to
cover the bottom of the pan. Fry like
a crepe, and remove from pan. Lay
fl ädla on paper towels to absorb any
excess oil.

Let cool, then roll each crepe and
cut into thin strips. Flädla can be
made a few days in advance and
refrigerated. Serve in hot soup and enjoy. JE
Th is article fi rst appeared on Th e Nosher.

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