Found: My Mother’s Long-Lost Recipe for her Single Signature Dish – Noodle Casserole

I mentioned earlier that my mother wasn’t a fan of cooking, though during her prime maternal years, she presented to me and my three sisters an impressively healthy array of morning entrees like stewed prunes, broiled grapefruit topped with brown sugar, oatmeal with a butter pat, or soft-boiled eggs served atop a piece of dry wheat toast, with these words: Eat a better breakfast, feel better all day.

Chamberlain sisters, from left, Doni, Shelly, Bethany and Jaimie, in Redding around 1963.

In my mother’s kitchen, a “better” breakfast had nothing to do with a tasty breakfast, but nutrition. Eat it. It’s good for you. 

Lunch and dinner weren’t so nutritious. In our family’s few functional years, lunches usually consisted of Campbell’s canned soup and a sandwich of some kind: grilled cheese, tuna, bologna or peanut butter and strawberry jam, made on whole wheat bread.

Dinners were often boxed Kraft Macaroni & Cheese or Chef Boyaredee spaghetti, or TV dinners or Banquet pot pies. Vegetables – typically peas and string beans – came from a can. They were mushy and the color of stagnant pond water. Because we four girls ate alone in the dining room, we had ample opportunity to stash unpalatable food under a secret compartment in our round oak table, or through an open dining room window to a camellia bush that was adorned with assorted rotting tomatoes, lettuce and carrots.

Let me just stop here to say that as someone who’s been obsessed with cooking since about age 5, I used to say things like, “My mother was a terrible cook.” I’ve revised that thinking, because I’ve come to believe that it’s unfair to judge women – and mothers in particular – by their culinary talents, or lack thereof. After all, just because a person is born with a uterus doesn’t mean she has to embrace cooking. Maybe she’s just not into cooking. And that’s OK.

Having said all that, there was a bright culinary spot in my childhood, The One Dish my mother made from scratch: noodle casserole. As a kid, I thought it was the most delicious food I’d ever tasted.

A key part of the recipe was the dish in which my mother baked it: a yellow Pyrex bowl, the largest of the set of nesting Pyrex bowls that were ubiquitous in nearly every American home in the ’60s and ’70s. I have two of those yellow bowls, acquired out of nostalgia for Mama’s long-lost recipe; barren vessels that had never actually held my mother’s delicious noodle casserole.

In my search for this recipe, I stretched my brain back to around 1966 to remember every detail I could about this dish. Mama called it a “noodle casserole”, but I did recall a few key ingredients: Wide egg noodles, hamburger and sharp cheddar cheese. I remembered how Mama topped the whole thing with cheese, and then baked it. The melted cheese that turned crispy and clung to the side of the bowl was the best part. Later in life, when I had lasagna for the first time, something about it sometimes reminded my of my mother’s noodle dish, but even so, I could never replicate it.

The last time my mother prepared her noodle casserole I was probably around 9 or so, which meant that with each year time slipped away from that date, the more faded my memory became of this dish. Of course I’d searched the Internet, but without success.

In desperation, about 10 years ago I even took advantage of my position at my former newspaper job where I once wrote a food column in which I invited readers to submit recipes for their best guess of my mother’s mystery dish.

I could tell immediately among all the goulash and pea casserole dishes submitted that they weren’t my mother’s recipe. It was like a food version of the Rumpelstiltskin story. “Is this potato and noodle casserole your mother’s recipe?”

No, and neither is your noodle kugel recipe or cheesy enchiladas or tuna casserole or beefy noodle stroganoff.

I was a major Doni Downer when it came to rejecting all those well-meaning recipes. Eventually, I stopped looking and chalked it up to all the other missing stuff from my mother’s Deanhart/turned Hart side, like actual family photographs (mug shots don’t count) or even so much as one living relative shaken from our bonsaied family tree branches that fail to reach beyond the 1900s in New York City.

You know how people say that when one stops trying to find love or a woman stops trying to have a baby, that’s exactly when you’ll find love and when she’ll become pregnant? That’s how it was with Mama’s casserole.

When I have large cooking projects, I watch the Food Network on my laptop in the kitchen to pass the time. One night, I’d already watched all the Chopped episodes, so I tried something new for me on the Food Network’s cooking videos: Ree Drummond, better known as The Pioneer Woman. The more I watched her, the better I liked her, her cooking style, her recipes, her kitchen, her life, and even her clothes. I became a fan.

So it was that I was up late burning the midnight oil as I cooked for a massive catering job that I had the Pioneer Woman keeping me company as she talked about make-ahead dishes to put up in the freezer.

I was only half-listening, but my ears perked up when she mentioned her mother’s favorite Sour Cream Noodle Bake recipe, a recipe an old friend had passed on to Drummond’s mother.  The Pioneer Woman had my full attention as she described the ingredients: Cheddar cheese, egg noodles, sour cream, cottage cheese, ground chuck and tomato sauce.

I knew it was my mother’s long-lost recipe. The only difference was that the Pioneer Woman baked her noodle dish in a rectangular pan, not a yellow Pyrex bowl.

No matter.

I bought the ingredients and baked it the next day. Sister Shelly was there for dinner that night, and after her first bite I asked about the reliability of her long-term taste memory.

“Pretty good,” she said. “If someone put a Fudgesicle from our childhood in front of me I could tell it was the real thing in one bite.”

I agreed. The same is true for the original Flicks chocolate, nothing like the inferior waxy product that is passed off as Flicks today.

It took two bites of the noodle bake before my taste buds registered historical recognition of something they hadn’t experienced in that exact combination since 1966. It was absolutely Mama’s recipe. The more we tasted the Pioneer Woman’s dish, the more Shelly and I critiqued it. We recalled more ground beef in our mother’s version than Drummond’s and wider egg noodles. Plus, Mama’s casserole was more moist. But otherwise, the flavor was spot on. As an aside, Drummond’s recipe calls for red pepper flakes and scallions, but my hunch is that if they were in my mother’s recipe, she omitted them to make the casserole more kid-palatable.

Here is a link to the Pioneer Woman’s recipe.

The recipe below is my adaptation of Drummond’s Sour Cream Noodle Bake to make it taste more as I remember my mother’s recipe. Mine includes more sour cream, which is funny, because Drummond talks about how she adapted the original recipe to have less sour cream, to suit her family’s taste. I also bumped up the beef, the cottage cheese and added a bit more salt and specified a pepper quantity. All this makes me wish I could see Drummond’s mother’s original recipe from a woman named Betty Daley. But I’ll let that go for now.

Sure, I cried a little as I ate the noodle casserole and realized that after so many years, my search for my mother’s mystery recipe was over. Was it as delicious as I remembered? Not really. It’s pretty pasta-heavy, and it isn’t hugely flavorful. But I’ll keep adjusting it until I love the noodle casserole as much as I did when I was a kid.

Now, if we could only make some headway on our genealogy research.

Mama’s Noodle Casserole

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Brown the ground beef in a large skillet. Drain the fat, and then add the tomato sauce, the salt and half the black pepper. Stir, and then simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.

Cook the egg noodles until al dente. Drain and set aside.

Combine the sour cream and cottage cheese. Add the remaining pepper. Add to the noodles and stir.

To assemble, add half of the noodle mixture to a buttered, large Pyrex oven-proof bowl (or a deep, rectangular baking dish). Top with half the meat mixture, and then sprinkle half the grated Cheddar over the meat. Repeat with the remaining noodle mixture, and the rest of the meat. End with a topping of cheese.

Bake until all the cheese is melted, about 20 minutes.

Source: Adapted from The Pioneer Woman’s recipe for Sour Cream Noodle Bake.