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Schwammichen Soup
Make soup strong and rich and flavor with any kind of vegetables liked, then strain, and just before serving, beat one egg, and into this add cracker crumbs enough to stick well together. Form into balls lightly, and put into soup. Let boil a few minutes and serve.
This is a clear broth with egg-and-cracker dumplings dropped in at the last moment. The recipe assumes you already have stock on the stove, so almost everything that can go wrong happens in the final five minutes.
- The hinge: keep the broth at a bare simmerA rolling boil batters the dumplings apart and clouds a strained soup. Bring the broth to the point where it just shivers, drop the balls in, cover, and leave them alone until they float and firm up, about 5 minutes.
- "Soup strong and rich"This means a well-reduced meat stock, not water with bouillon. The recipe specifies no quantity and leaves the vegetables to the cook ("any kind of vegetables liked"); about 6 cups of good beef or chicken stock, simmered with onion, carrot, celery and parsley and then strained, is a reasonable working reading.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod crackers were plain, hard soda or water crackers. Use unsalted saltines or water biscuits crushed fine; skip anything buttery or seasoned, which will slick the broth. Figure roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of crumbs per large egg, added until the mix just holds a shape.
- "Stick well together" is a texture, not a measureThe dough should be soft enough to sag slightly but not so wet that it spreads on the spoon. Let it rest 10 minutes before shaping; the crumbs keep absorbing and a mix that looked loose will tighten.
- Form lightlyPacking the balls hard gives you pebbles. Roll them with wet hands to about the size of a hazelnut and expect them to swell a little. Test one first: if it disintegrates, work in more crumbs; if it sinks like a stone, the next batch wants a gentler hand.
- SeasoningNo salt is mentioned anywhere. Salt the broth to taste after straining, and season the egg mixture as well, with a scrape of nutmeg, a seasoning commonly used in German crumb dumplings, if you want it.
- YieldOne egg's worth of dumplings serves four as a first course in about 6 cups of broth. Scale the egg and crumbs together for more.
The name is generally taken to be an Americanised spelling of the German Schwämmchen, often read as "little sponges" — a fair description of what a boiled egg-and-crumb dumpling looks like when it swells in hot broth — though in southern German and Austrian usage Schwamm commonly means mushroom, so the gloss is a plausible reading rather than an established one. Soups of this family run all through German and Austrian cooking, where a clear meat broth is treated as a vehicle for an Einlage, a garnish cooked in it at the last minute: liver dumplings, semolina dumplings, shredded pancake, or, as here, whatever dry crackers the pantry held. Its appearance in an American household book reflects how thoroughly German cooking had entered the general recipe pool. The reliance on cracker crumbs rather than breadcrumbs is the American adjustment: commercial soda crackers were cheap, shelf-stable and in every kitchen.