A pasta product containing no eggs.
According to my grade six teacher, the expression “use your noodle” came about because the brain resembles a big bowl of noodles (especially those thick, steaming noodles that the Japanese call udon). I was disabused of this comforting notion twenty-five years later upon discovering that noodle, meaning head, derives from noddle, a word that emerged in the fifteenth century, three hundred years before the appearance of the culinary noodle. (This noddle, incidentally, is probably related to nod, meaning to tilt the head forward.) The culinary noodle, on the other hand, which appeared in the late eighteenth century, derives from the German nudel, a word that has nothing to do with running around naked. Other words to which noodle and nudel are probably related include the German knodel, a small dumpling whose name was borrowed in the early nineteenth century, and the Yiddish knaidel, another kind of small dumpling whose name was borrowed in the 1950s. The ultimate source of this cluster of words may be the German knode, meaning knot.
A batter comprising flour and eggs, flattened to a fine thickness and subsequently sliced into elongated, level and frequently slim strands.