What Is Kugel? Noodle and Potato Kugel Explained

Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking.

What it is

Kugel is a baked dish of the Ashkenazi Jewish table. The version most often meant by the name is sweet: egg noodles in a custard of cottage cheese, sour cream and cream cheese, with raisins and cinnamon. Other kugels are salt-and-pepper, and which kind a family makes still depends on where it comes from.

It started in the Shabbat stew

The name is the German word for ball. Kugel began as batter dumplings dropped into the Shabbat stew on Friday and left to simmer overnight, then served after synagogue. That stew is cholent, set up on Friday before sunset so that it keeps cooking on its own until the Saturday meal. It is part of our Shabbat recipe collection.

Noodles first, potatoes later

The earliest kugels were made mostly from bread dough. Noodle kugel appeared around the 1500s, about 300 years before potato kugel. Noodles reached Ashkenazi kitchens by two routes: Jewish travelers brought them from Italy into the Franco-German lands in the 14th century, and Tatars brought them from Central Asia into the Slavic lands about two centuries later.

Sweet or peppery

Sugar made kugel sweet. In the early 1800s Polish Jews went into sugar beet refining, and the cheaper sugar went into dishes like noodle kugel. Sweet kugel is still more common in Poland and Hungary, salt-and-pepper kugel in Lithuania. A Yiddish scholar traced the same divide for gefilte fish in the 1960s; it later came to be called the gefilte fish line.

The first published American kugel recipe, in a cookbook of 1871, is already a sweet noodle kugel, with homemade noodles, raisins, eggs and sugar. The cornflake topping is a mid-20th-century American addition.

Dairy or pareve

Cottage or farmer’s cheese turned the sweet kugel into a dairy dish, and some early Jewish cookbooks gave it for Shavuot only. Shavuot is the holiday of dairy foods, and kugel still belongs to it. A dairy kugel goes on a dairy table, not next to meat, so some families who keep kosher make a pareve kugel for meat meals instead.

The two noodle kugels on this site

Our Traditional Noodle Kugel is the sweet dairy kind, with raisins and a cinnamon cornflake topping, at about 570 to 695 calories a serving. The Healthy Noodle Kugel uses whole wheat noodles, swaps three of the six eggs for egg whites, puts cottage cheese and Greek yogurt in place of the cream cheese and sour cream, cuts the sugar and butter sharply and adds an oat and walnut topping. A serving comes to about 370 to 455 calories. Either kugel can be assembled, covered and refrigerated overnight before baking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the word kugel mean?

It is the German word for ball, a reference to the batter dumplings that were kugel’s earliest form, cooked in the Shabbat stew.

What is the difference between noodle kugel and potato kugel?

Noodle kugel is built on egg noodles and is the older of the two, dating to around the 1500s; potato kugel followed about 300 years later. The noodle kind can be sweet or peppery, depending on where a family comes from.

Why is kugel eaten on Shavuot?

Shavuot is a holiday of dairy foods, and the sweet kugel is a dairy dish. Two explanations are given for dairy on the holiday: the Israelites had no separate meat and dairy pots when they received the Torah, and kugel’s sweetness recalls the sweetness of the Torah and the land flowing with milk and honey.

Can kugel be served with a meat meal?

A dairy kugel cannot; it belongs on a dairy table. Some families who keep kosher make a pareve kugel instead for meat meals.

Why is kugel eaten on Shabbat?

It began as batter dumplings dropped into the Shabbat stew on Friday, left to simmer overnight and served after synagogue.

What Is Kugel?