Peel 5 potatoes and boil whole in salted water until tender. Drain, let get cold, then grate them and mix with 4 eggs and 1 ounce of butter; add salt to taste. Mix well; add flour enough to form into dumplings and fry in deep hot lard until brown. Serve hot with cooked fruit.
A short, loosely written recipe of the kind common in daily-dish calendars: the flour is left to the cook's judgement and the frying medium is lard. A few notes make it workable.
- Potato choice and temperatureUse starchy potatoes (russets or similar). The recipe peels before boiling; boiling in the skins and peeling after is a common modern preference. The instruction to cool them completely before grating is the hinge of the recipe: warm potato releases free starch and turns gluey, and the dumplings will absorb fat instead of browning. Chilling overnight is better still.
- How much flour"Flour enough" is genuinely ambiguous. Expect somewhere around 3/4 to 1 1/4 cups for five medium potatoes, added a spoonful at a time until the mass just holds a shape. Stop as soon as it does; every extra spoonful makes the dumpling heavier.
- Four eggs is a lotFour whole eggs to five potatoes gives a slack, batter-like dough that demands more flour to compensate. Two eggs plus a yolk gives a lighter dumpling with less flour, if you want to lean that way.
- Fat for fryingLard is still sold and fries these well at 350-360F. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point substitutes directly. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop below temperature, and test one dumpling first to check that it holds together.
- 1 ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. Melt it before mixing so it distributes rather than sitting in lumps.
- "Cooked fruit"Period shorthand for stewed or preserved fruit served warm and lightly sweetened -- plums, apricots, apples, or a compote of cherries. Buttered breadcrumbs with sugar are the usual Central European accompaniment to boiled potato-dough fruit dumplings, and are sometimes used with fried ones as well.
- YieldRoughly 12 to 16 dumplings, enough for four as a sweet course or a light supper.
Potato dumplings run through the whole former Habsburg kitchen -- Austrian Erdäpfelknödel, Bohemian bramborové knedlíky, Bavarian variants -- and they are usually cooked in one of two ways: simmered in water, or, as here, formed and fried. The dough is the same base used for fruit dumplings, where a whole plum or apricot is wrapped inside; served with stewed fruit, as this version is, it sits at the same table, dessert and starch at once, which is characteristic of a cuisine where sweet dishes were often a main course rather than an afterthought. That it is filed simply as "Austrian" says something about the book itself: this is a day-a-dish calendar cookbook, where each nation was represented by a single emblematic plate and the reader was invited to travel through the year by eating.