The annual family dinner tradition of getting together to have Toadbellies was my favorite celebration growing up. It was better than Thanksgiving, which was very big and very traditionally Midwestern, with turkey and jellied cranberry sauce with the can rings to mark out how to cut it, and large California black olives.
The Toadbellies supper was even better than Christmas, when we got those small, easy-to-peel tangerines in our stockings.
We had Toadbellies for dinner toward the end of February to celebrate my father’s and my Uncle George’s birthdays. My dad and uncle were both born in February, about a week apart. Dad was the older of the two. Their mom, Sylvia, and sister, Helen, lived together and would set a weekend date near the end of February to have us all over. They got to set the date because they would have to start preparing the meal at least a couple of days before we could all converge on their home to gorge ourselves on this homemade treat.
“Toadbellies” was the family nickname for a filled noodle. Just think of a large, meat-filled ravioli where the pasta ends were not cut off, but allowed to dangle a little bit. Dad and his brother had dubbed the noodles “Toadbellies” when they were children, saying they looked just like the big white bellies of toads. I’m quite sure that the name became the family tradition because of the mock outrage it caused their mother and sister.
But I’m not sure why Dad and Uncle George fixed on Toadbellies for their birthday dinner. I only know that it was our family tradition that each birthday person could select the dinner of their choice and have it prepared for them on their special day. I’m just glad they always wanted Toadbellies. (My brother had a habit of asking for hot dogs and sauerkraut.)
We’d arrive at Sylvia and Helen’s house sometime in the mid-afternoon to join in preparing dinner. The house would already be full of people playing cards in the dining room, helping in the kitchen, and reading or trading gossip in the living room. Sometimes there were as many as 15 people or more! The whole house would be steamy because it was winter, and there was a big pot of beef broth simmering on the stove. Sometimes my mom would play the “Boogie-Woogie” on grandma’s piano.
The youngest children would be running around, getting underfoot and asking for treats while Tippy, Grandma’s toothless, old, terrier dog would either huddle on his bed or get exiled to the enclosed back porch.
It sounds chaotic, but I found it very homey.
Grandma and Aunt Helen had to make the noodle dough by hand and roll it out, as no one had a pasta machine in the 1960s. I’ve tried to make noodles by hand and rolling them out is really hard! The filled noodle would be slowly slipped into the simmering broth and cooked until the filling was done. There would be a bunch of us trying to get the first bowls of hot broth and a couple of Toadbellies under our belts, all at once. We would all be angling for our share with Grandma and Aunt Helen yelling that we were eating “filled noodles,” and we were not to call them “Toadbellies”!
We never stopped calling them Toadbellies.
I never wondered why this was a family tradition when I was a child. I knew that Grandma’s grandparents came from Germany, and we visited there about 10 years ago. That’s where we discovered that a traditional dish in the Swabian region is Maultaschen, a filled noodle, which I ordered in a restaurant in Stuttgart. It was folded in a more complex way, but the clear beef broth and rich, beefy flavor was like my grandma’s.
I was surprised to find out that our Toadbellies were really a regional dish from the area my great grandmother came from. It was gratifying to find this out, and I felt I’d made a connection to my great grandma even more so to her daughter, Sylvia, the only grandparent I ever knew.
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