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POTATO KLOSSE (a German dish)
Scoop the floury part from five or six baked potatoes, until six ounces of potato flour have been obtained. Mix with this two ounces of butter beaten to a cream, a little salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, and the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. Beat the mixture thoroughly, and form it into small balls. Drop these in boiling salt and water, and be careful to do this with a metal spoon, and to dip it into boiling water each time it is used. Serve the klosse with soup. Or, take the same weight of potato flour. Beat it until smooth with two ounces of butter which has been beaten to a cream, and add two ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs, one ounce of grated Parmesan, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, the yolks of two and the white of one egg. Mould the klosse into the desired shapes, and boil them as above. Serve on a hot dish, with fried bread-crumbs sprinkled over them. Time to boil the klosse, ten minutes. Probable cost, 6d. or 8d. for this quantity. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A pair of German potato dumplings, one plain for soup and one enriched with Parmesan and crumbs. The wording carries one term that will mislead a modern cook if taken at face value.
- "Potato flour" here is not starchThe recipe defines it in its own first line: the dry, floury interior scooped from baked potatoes. Do not substitute the boxed potato starch sold under that name, which behaves nothing like it. Six ounces is roughly 170 g of scooped flesh; the recipe expects five or six potatoes because only the driest floury part is taken from each.
- Bake, do not boil, the potatoesThe whole method depends on dry flesh. Bake floury potatoes (russet, Maris Piper, King Edward) directly on the oven rack until fully soft -- a moderately hot modern oven, around 400F, though the book gives no temperature -- then split them and scoop while hot. Pass the flesh through a ricer or sieve rather than mashing, which develops gluey starch.
- Weights and yieldsTwo ounces of butter is 55 g, two ounces of breadcrumbs about 55 g, one ounce of Parmesan about 28 g. The book claims five or six servings, which is realistic only as a soup garnish; as a plated dish with the crumb topping it feeds three or four.
- Simmer, do not boilDespite the instruction, a hard rolling boil breaks these dumplings apart. Bring the salted water to the boil, then drop the heat so it barely trembles before the klosse go in. Ten minutes is right for balls of about an inch; they are done shortly after they rise.
- Test one firstCook a single dumpling before shaping the rest. If it disintegrates, work in another spoonful of breadcrumbs or a little flour; if it is heavy, the potato was too wet.
- The hot spoonDipping the metal spoon in boiling water each time is not fussiness. The mixture is sticky with warm starch and butter, and a wet hot spoon releases it cleanly. Wetted hands do the same job for shaping.
- Fried crumbsFor the second version, fry the topping crumbs in butter until they are properly brown and crisp, and add them at the table. They soften within a minute or two of hitting the damp dumplings.
Klöße (singular Kloß) are the standard German dumpling, made across the southern and eastern states from potato, bread or a mixture of both, and served with roast meats and their gravy or dropped into broth. The division here between a plain soup dumpling and a richer version with cheese and crumbs reflects real German practice, where the same dough is stretched between garnish and main dish depending on what the household can spare. Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian British kitchens, collected a good many such Continental dishes and presented them with an anglicised spelling and a costing in pence; the sixpence-or-eightpence estimate marks this as a cheap dish built on baked potatoes and a little butter. The insistence on baked rather than boiled potato is the detail the recipe holds to, and it is often said that the drier flesh is what keeps the dumplings from dissolving in the pot.