Soak 6 crackers in water; then press dry. Fry 1 chopped onion in butter and pour over the crackers. Add 3 eggs and chopped parsley; sprinkle with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Mix all with some cracker-meal until you can form into balls and boil in salted water until done. Serve hot with melted butter poured over them, and garnish with parsley.
A cracker-based dumpling of the knaidel family, written for cooks who kept a box of soda crackers or matzo rather than a bag of matzo meal. The instructions assume more than they state, so a few numbers help.
- What the crackers arePlain unsalted soda crackers, nothing seasoned or buttered; matzo will do the same job, though a sheet of matzo is much larger than a cracker, so the count is not interchangeable. Soak until fully soft, then squeeze hard between the palms; leftover water is a common cause of dumplings that fall apart in the pot.
- Cracker-mealCrackers ground fine; it is still sold under that name, and matzo meal serves the same purpose. Add it a tablespoon at a time until the mass just holds a ball; too much gives you weights rather than dumplings.
- Rest the mixtureThe recipe omits it, but chilling the mix 20 to 30 minutes lets the meal hydrate and firms it enough to shape. Wet hands make rolling far easier.
- "Boil until done"A gentle simmer, not a rolling boil, which tears them. Walnut-sized balls take 15 to 20 minutes in well-salted water; they float long before they are cooked through, so cut one open to check the centre is no longer dense and dry.
- Cook a test dumplingDrop one in first. If it disintegrates, work in more meal; if it comes out leaden, thin the mix with a spoonful of the soaking water or a little more egg.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a pinch. Pre-ground nutmeg from an old jar is flat, and this dumpling has very little else in the way of seasoning to hide behind.
- Butter and dietary lawButter here means the dumplings belong to a dairy or vegetarian meal. Cooked in or served alongside a chicken soup, as knaidlach usually are, the butter needs to become schmaltz or oil.
- YieldDepends entirely on the size of the crackers and how much meal is worked in; expect roughly a dozen small dumplings, but treat that as a guess rather than a count.
These are of the knaidlach family, the boiled matzo dumplings of Ashkenazi kitchens, given here under a national or ethnic label rather than the dish's own name — "Jewish" — with no mention of Passover. Soaked and pressed matzo bound with egg is an older method than commercially packaged meal, which spread through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Butter rather than schmaltz means the dish as written belongs to a dairy meal.