Recently my out-of-town son asked me for a very old recipe that I used in the 1970s. I hadn’t made it since my children moved far away.

I couldn’t remember if I had ever put it in a newspaper column, so I searched my old files. Nothing there and I had difficulty recalling the details. I was wracking my brain trying to recall the recipe so my son could create his own version for his family. His partner is from Trinidad so he is often trying to introduce and replicate his mother’s recipes. (Things she would not be familiar with.)

A forum contact agent in California is Russian Jewish and one day on the forum, she said something like, “Gotta go now and make my Noodle Kugel.”

I nearly dropped my laptop on the floor. What? Can you concentrate on something so strongly that your thoughts go out into the ethers where someone else provides the answer? Who knows?

She doesn’t make the kugel exactly the way I do, but the basic ingredients were generally the same. Hers is a variable of the old, old recipe that I had lost track of from the 1970s.

So here is my recreated version of…

Pastalicious (my name for it) Russian Noodle Kugel

Ingredients:

8 oz full-fat top brand-name sour cream – I only use Gay Lea brand

8 oz very best fresh cottage cheese

2 large eggs

1/2 stick of sweet unsalted butter (4 oz)

1/2 cup white sugar

vanilla – only real vanilla or scrape a bean

pinch of salt

Directions:

Stir the above ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.

Cook a large package of wide egg noodles in salted water until barely al dente. Be careful not to overcook, because baking will turn the noodles to mush. You don’t want mush.

Drain well, but do not rinse the pasta. Let cool, tented but not sealed, so the pasta can breathe but not dry out.

Use tongs or a long-tined fork to gently incorporate the noodles into the mixing bowl and then place the noodles into a rectangular buttered glass baking dish.

Gently fold in maraschino red (and/or green for festive celebrations) cherries, as many as you like. Try adding raisins that have been soaked in rum. Blueberries work. Other fruit, not so well.

Next time I make my Pastalicious I might try using fresh figs marinated in cognac and a handful of fresh from the shell, candied walnut pieces, for a gourmet adult version. And spritz the pasta serving with real maple syrup.

Decorate with a whole green fresh fig, split in half, spritzed with Chartreuse, positioned on the side in a puddle of stiff whipped cream.

The final baking step: Pour 12 ounces of half and half cream over noodles in the glass baking dish. Don’t stir. The noodles will absorb the cream.

Remember that when you bake using glass dishes, you need to lower your regular oven temperature by 25 degrees for best results with any recipe.

Check your oven often, especially if you don’t use it regularly.

You will know your own oven. Bake on the middle rack, at 325-350 for about a half hour. Use your oven thermometers. When a knife inserted comes out clean, the dish is finished.

Let cool completely. Serve in large spoonfuls, or cut in large squares. For a really special dinner delight, drizzle with freshly made fruit sauce in season.

My colleague doesn’t use raisins or Maraschino cherries, but I always did. When I shared that with her, she said she would add it to her recipe.

Imagine my surprise at this wonderful recipe, long gone and then reappearing. I was more than a little shocked, and pleased.

My original recipe came from a senior Jewish friend, in the late ʼ60s, when my children were very small. I modified it many ways over the years, to make it my own.

Savoury version

I don’t know of anyone having done this, but a wonderful idea I had:

For a savoury version, make the recipe minus the sugar and vanilla. Instead of fruit, use barely cooked lobster, crab, shrimp and/or other seafood.

Poach a half dozen garlic cloves in melted herb butter over medium heat. Mash and stir into a quarter cup of sautéed minced onion. The garlic becomes so mild you won’t believe it.

I add poached mashed garlic to many recipes. No one even knows there’s garlic there; it merely enhances other flavours.

Stir in your favourite herbs and spices. I prefer thyme, parsley, salt and fresh ground pepper. You might like to add minced, sautéed fennel. Whatever satiates your herb tooth.

Stir this mixture into the egg/cheese mix. Add the cooked, drained egg noodles.

Sauté a dozen medium large shrimp, barely cooked. When they are no longer translucent, they are cooked.

Add a half cup cooked crab meat and a half cup of cooked lobster pieces (leftovers from a lobster meal. Tinned frozen lobster works well, too.) Always keep a large tin in the freezer for gourmet emergencies.

Flambé with your favourite cognac. Scrape the drippings from the skillet and gently incorporate the seafood into the noodle mix.

Bake as for the dessert recipe. Decorate with fennel fronds on separate serving plates. It’s okay to add one of my marinated figs on the side of this savoury dish.

Nestle the savoury seafood kugel servings on a bed of mixed shredded greens.  The ideal presentation is on a see-through glass plate. Serve at room temperature.

A great side for this gourmet lunch is my recipe for zucchini fries, served in a paper take-out container. Or my bay-scallop blintzes, made with basil and served with a dollop of sour cream and a small slice of lox. Grate a small turn of peppercorns.

Food for royalty, at your fingertips. Complicated? No. Absolutely not. Anyone can make this dream lunch. To make a more complete meal for a dinner gathering, add a salad.

My Boston Bibb hydroponically grown lettuce with warm blue cheese dressing and sliced,  marinated bottled imported baby beets completes the table offering.

A Caesar salad would be too overpowering, but a spinach salad would work.

For dessert: a plain, naked panna cotta. And a snifter of your favourite brandy, perhaps. In Cuban cigar-smoking days, that would have been the ultimate expression for the man at the table, but it’s mostly no longer acceptable.

C’est la vie, gourmet.