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Uncle Al survived to adulthood sustained from month to month by little more than the healthful calories and nutrients to be found in lukschen kugel, and rarely elsewhere in his mother's otherwise awful cooking.
Mother Schwartz, "Just because the smoke alarm yells doesn't mean that supper is ready." She boiled canned green beans (already autoclaved) beyond flaccidity all the way to color loss. "You should see how some other mothers cook." Please!
A recipe handed down through generations of Eastern Europeans, their shoulders bent and their chins bristly with stubble (the men were even more scrofulous), was sustained by faith and sheer mean-spiritedness. Not even knowing what a pineapple was, the child-weary sufferers of calloused and arthritic knuckles indoctrinated their virgin daughters with the legend, sustaining hope that the South Sea Islands might one day be discovered and the recipe finally fully brought forth.
Now, a helpful word from the National Heart Association: "Lukschen kugel contains nothing even remotely resembling fish oil or attic insulation, and we warn the American public that good tasting grub like this is a Communist plot to narrow patriotic American coronary arteries with godless low density lipoproteins and cholesteric Socialist sludge. Lukschen kugel should be banned from human consumption. Eat oat bran."
All this brouhaha stems from a noodle-laden fruit and egg custard whose density 30 minutes after baking closely approximates that of plutonium. "Kugel" is German for "cannonball." When Eastern Europeans cook, they cook for eternity! Here we go:
6 large eggs, beaten (and often stolen) 12-16 oz. crushed pineapple, drained (a rough one, ante-Hawaii) 1 cup brown sugar (to make the macrobiotic wombats happy) 2.5 cups unsweetened applesauce (keeps the doctor/dentist away) 2.5 tblsp. lemon juice (ascorbate inhibits apple phenol oxidase) 3/4 stick margarine, diced (lubrication down the throat) 12-16 oz. wide egg noodles, cooked firmer than al dente (bulk) 1 tsp. vanilla extract (FDA-approved aphrodisiac) 3 thinly sliced, peeled apples (not Delicious, they're not food) Honey (bee spit has anti-bacterial properties) Powdered cinnamon Powdered cloves Powdered allspice
In a casserole dish combine and mix well all the ingredients down to but not including the honey, reserving one sliced apple. Very lightly dust the surface with allspice and cloves, cover it with the reserved apple slices, drizzle honey all over the top, and dust heavily with cinnamon. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) for 1.25 hours, then cautiously for 15 minutes more until the kugel's underside has begun to brown (don't you love recipe escape clauses?). Kugel is great hot, warm or cold, notably as a poultry side dish. Store refrigerated and covered.
Calorie count: One serving of lukschen kugel will make you malignantly obese. A pig-out will achieve human critical mass and the possibility of a quantum implosion. Be cognizant of your post-prandial Schwarzschild radius, r=2Gm/c2.
Mother cruelly omitted the good stuff on top in favor of roofing her kugels with brown raisins (loathsome), or crushed potato chips (odious), or crushed corn flakes (too awful to contemplate). It was a heroic test of childhood to fragment and consume the blackened ceramic rind of her handiwork on the way to finally penetrating down to the yummy inner treasures. NASA used a morphologically and organoleptically similar phenol-formaldehyde composite for the heat shields of early American space capsules. Imagine the lack of esprit de corps that would have resulted if the astronauts were forced to eat the things after they splashed down. That was my suppertime.
Some four decades have passed since I fled my mother's Brooklyn, New York apartment for more conventional social, cultural, and gastronomic configurations in Southern California. The "POP!" emitted by air rushing to fill the void I left behind rang loud in my ears. Mother came to visit this Thanksgiving. While mother was here, covertly looking in the drawers and behind the toilet, bothering the cat and scaring the neighbors with rumors of block busting, I made her my lukschen kugel. Her expert evaluation of my efforts rings true to memory:
"This doesn't smell right. You got any salt?"
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