CHICAGO — My late grandmother Ann Stein was not, by modern standards, a great cook.

Like a lot of Jewish grandmothers, she had mastered a basic repertoire of unadorned dishes — baked chicken, beef brisket, roasts, Jell-O mold and chocolate cake — and pretty much stuck to it.

She used too much salt and not enough spices. Vegetables were string beans or corn. Sometimes her cakes fell, and she'd blame the "new" oven she'd had for years.

Yet somehow, decades after the last meal she ever cooked for me, I can still summon vivid taste-memories of my grandmother's signature dishes, while I can scarcely recall many of the more elaborate gourmet meals I've had at some of America's finest restaurants.

The comfort food I miss most is Grandma Ann's noodle kugel, a dense, sweet egg-noodle casserole rich with butter, sugar, sour cream and raisins that would likely send any licensed nutritionist running from the kitchen.

"Kugel" is a Yiddish word for casserole, and both sweet and savory variations of my grandmother's kugel have been handed down in Jewish families for centuries. The dish traces back to Germany, as best anyone can tell, and is traditionally served on the Jewish Sabbath and certain holidays as a special dessert.

My grandmother wasn't much for rules, however, so she offered the treat far more liberally, and always as a side dish at dinner. Kugel was definitely not dessert. Chocolate cake was dessert.

Grandma wasn't much for recipes, either — everything she cooked she could make in her sleep, so she rarely bothered with writing anything down. But as she grew older — she died last year at the age of 94, although she had stopped cooking years ago — my mother encouraged her to at least commit her kugel recipe to paper so the rest of us could attempt to duplicate it.

She complied, but in her own sweetly distinctive way: The recipe she left us has the ingredients but is missing most of the measurements and all the cooking instructions. I guess she just figured we'd know.

Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, we do. My mom found a recipe very similar to Grandma's — complete with all the missing pieces — at all recipes.com, created by a woman named Lauren Kargen. So now we can make Grandma Ann's kugel whenever we like. Which of course makes us miss her more than ever.

NOODLE KUGEL