Soups are nearly always good in Germany, and some of the best are not known in England. The dried green corn so much used for soup in South Germany can, however, be bought in London from the German provision merchants, so at the end of this greedy chapter I will give a recipe for making it. _Nudelsuppe_ of strong chicken stock and home-made _Nudeln_ used to be what the Berliner called his roast goose--"_eine jute Jabe Jottes_," but the degenerate Germans of to-day buy tasteless manufactured _Nudeln_ instead of rolling out their own. _Nudeln_ are the German form of macaroni, but when properly made they are better than any macaroni can be. If you have been brought up in an old-fashioned German ménage, and, as a child likes to do, peeped into the kitchen sometimes, you will remember seeing large sheets of something as thin and yellow as chamois leather hung on a clothes horse to dry. Then you knew that there would be _Nudeln_ for your dinner, either narrow ones in soup, or wider ones boiled in water and sprinkled with others cut as fine as vermicelli and fried brown in butter. The paste is troublesome to make. It begins with a deceptive simplicity. Take four whole eggs and four tablespoonsful of milk if you want enough for ten people, says the cookery book, and make a light dough of it with a knife in a basin. Anyone can do that, you find. But then you must put your dough on the pastry board, and work in more flour as you knead it with your hands. "The longer you knead and the stiffer the dough is the better your _Nudeln_ will be," continues the cookery book. But the next operation is to cut the dough into four, and roll out each portion _as thin as paper_, and no one who has not seen German _Nudeln_ before they are cooked can believe that this is actually done. It is no use to give the rest of the recipe for drying them, rolling each piece loosely and cutting it into strips and boiling them with salt in water. If you told your English cook to make you _Nudeln_ she would despise it for a foreign mess, and bring you something as thick as a pancake. If you want them you had better get them in a box from a provision merchant, as the _Hausfrau_ herself does nowadays.