Boil 6 potatoes, then grate them. Mix with 2 tablespoonfuls of flour and 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and 3 eggs. Make into a soft dough; roll out and then spread with fried bread-crumbs. Make into round dumplings and let boil twenty minutes. Serve hot with melted butter poured over.
A terse late-Victorian entry that assumes you already know how a potato dumpling behaves. The critical variable is moisture: everything else follows from it.
- Cook and cool the potatoes firstBoil them in their skins, peel while warm, and let them cool and dry before grating — hot, wet potato absorbs far more flour and turns gluey. Floury baking potatoes give a lighter dumpling than waxy ones.
- Quantities are elasticSix medium potatoes come to roughly 2 lb, and 2 tablespoons of flour is a bare minimum for that weight. Expect to work in more flour, a spoonful at a time, until the dough just holds together; the less you add the tenderer the result.
- Three eggs is a lotFor this quantity of potato, whole eggs give a firm, almost noodle-like dumpling. Many modern Swiss and southern German recipes use less egg — two whole eggs, or yolks only.
- "Roll out" looselyThe dough will not roll like pastry. Pat it out on a well-floured board about half an inch thick, scatter the fried crumbs over, then cut and shape into balls with floured hands — the crumbs end up marbled through rather than as a neat filling.
- The fried bread-crumbsCoarse dry crumbs browned in butter, not fine packaged crumbs, which go pasty. Brown them slowly; they will darken further off the heat.
- Simmer, never boilTwenty minutes at a rolling boil will break these apart. Use a wide pan of well-salted water held at a bare shiver, and test one dumpling before committing the batch.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten dumplings, serving four as a side. Melted butter poured over is the whole sauce; browned butter with a few extra crumbs is the usual refinement.
Grated-potato dumplings run in a broad band across the Alps and central Europe — Bavarian and Austrian Kartoffelknödel, Czech bramborové knedlíky — and the buttered-crumb core here is the same idea as the fried-bread filling found in the German-speaking versions. The book that carries this is a page-a-day compilation: one dish for every date, each tagged with a country. That framing explains the brevity and the vagueness of the flour measure. Potatoes were a comparatively late arrival in Swiss cooking, spreading through the cantons in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and dumplings like this belong to the frugal end of that tradition — a way of stretching leftover boiled potatoes and stale bread into a dish that eats like a course.