Chop ½ pound of liver; add 1 chopped onion, some parsley, salt, pepper and a little nutmeg. Mix with 2 beaten eggs and 1 tablespoonful of butter. Add enough bread-crumbs to form into small balls and boil in soup-stock and serve with the soup.
September 18 — No. 18
German
A compressed version of Leberknödel, the liver dumplings that float in clear broth all over southern Germany and Austria. The recipe assumes you know what a dumpling batter should feel like, so the guidance below fills in what it leaves out.
- Simmer, never boilDespite the wording, a rolling boil will break these apart — liver dumplings are bound only by egg and crumb. Bring the stock to a bare shiver, around 180-190F, and hold it there for 15-20 minutes until the dumplings rise and stay up.
- The liverCalf's liver is the mildest choice; pork and beef liver are both used in German versions and give a stronger flavour. Chop it very fine, or pulse it raw in a food processor.
- Crumbs"Enough bread-crumbs" is genuinely open-ended; expect roughly 1 to 1½ cups of dry crumbs for ½ lb of liver. The classic method is better: soak two stale white rolls in milk, squeeze them out hard, and use that instead, which gives a lighter dumpling.
- Test one firstPoach a single small dumpling before shaping the rest. If it disintegrates, work in more crumbs; if it turns dense and bouncy, the mix is too dry and needs a splash of milk or a second egg.
- The butterMelt it and cool it slightly before mixing, or it will seize into lumps in the cold liver. Some cooks render a little bacon fat with the onion and use that instead.
- Cook the onionThe recipe adds it raw. Sweating the chopped onion in the tablespoon of butter until soft, then cooling it, removes the raw bite and is common in German recipes.
- SeasoningLiver mixtures need more salt than they look like they need, and marjoram is the usual German partner alongside the nutmeg. Season the mix, then taste the poaching test dumpling before committing.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 walnut-sized dumplings, enough for four servings of soup. Cook them in a separate pot of stock if you want the soup to stay clear, then transfer them to the serving bowls.
Leberknödel belong to the broad family of Bavarian, Swabian and Austrian bread dumplings built on stale rolls — a frugal use of both day-old bread and offal, two things a household bought cheaply or already had. They appear most often as Leberknödelsuppe, one or two dumplings in a clear beef broth, still a familiar opening course in Austrian and Bavarian inns. The book's compressed, one-paragraph treatment — a dish a day, each attributed to a nation — belongs to a format said to have found an audience among American cooks who wanted variety without a whole foreign cookbook, though the book's date is not established here. The dish had a real constituency in the United States, carried over by German-speaking immigrants, which is why a book of this kind could print it with no explanation of what a Knödel was.