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German Potato Dumplings
Scrub any number of large potatoes and bake them in their skins. As soon as done break open, scoop out the insides and press through a ricer, setting aside until cold. To I heaping cupful of the potato allow 1/4 of a teaspoonful of salt, a tiny pinch of nutmeg or mace, 1 tablespoonful of fried bread crumbs and 1 teaspoonful of beef suet chopped as fine as dust (this can be done by sprinkling over it the measured flour). Mix to a very thick batter or soft dough with beaten egg.
Flour the hands and mold into tiny dumplings.
Drop into boiling salted water and simmer for fifteen minutes.
Baked Sweet Potatoes, Creole Style Peel ½ dozen medium sized sweet potatoes.
Put them into a deep pan, and half cover them with a nicely seasoned gravy from a roasting joint of beef, mutton or pork. Set them in the oven and bake until tender, taking care to baste them from time to time.
A dry-potato dumpling of the Kartoffelklösse family, bound with egg rather than heavy flour. Two recipes have run together in the original text; the sweet potato instruction at the end belongs to a separate entry.
- The hinge: bake, don't boil, the potatoesBaking in the skin drives off moisture, which is what lets the dumplings hold together with almost no flour. Boiled potatoes will give a wet mass that needs so much flour it turns to paste.
- Cold potato is not optionalRicing hot potato and mixing it warm with egg gives a slack, sticky dough. Rice it while hot so no lumps survive, then chill it thoroughly before mixing.
- The missing flour quantityThe recipe refers to "the measured flour" but never measures it. Read this as the flour used to dust the suet and the hands only; start with a tablespoon per cup of potato and add more only if the dough will not hold a shape.
- Beef suetRaw kidney fat from a butcher, not the boxed shredded suet sold for puddings, which contains flour. Freeze it and grate it, or substitute an equal amount of frozen grated butter or lard.
- Fried bread crumbsDry crumbs browned in butter until deep gold. In German practice fried bread, more often small cubes than crumbs, is sometimes tucked into the centre of each dumpling rather than mixed through, which is worth trying.
- Simmer, never boil hardA rolling boil tears these apart. Bring salted water to the boil, drop the dumplings in, then drop the heat so the surface only trembles. Fifteen minutes suits walnut-sized dumplings; test one before committing the batch.
- Test dumpling firstCook a single dumpling before shaping the rest. If it disintegrates, work in a little more flour or a second egg yolk.
- Yield and servingOne heaping cup of riced potato, with enough beaten egg to bind, makes roughly a dozen small dumplings, enough for two as a side. Serve at once with a roast and its gravy, or with browned butter and more crumbs.
- The sweet potato fragment"12 dozen medium sized sweet potatoes" looks like a printing error for a far smaller number; potatoes half covered in pan gravy and baked until tender, with occasional basting, is the sense of it.
Potato dumplings are among the clearest markers of the German kitchen in American cookbooks, settling into the Midwest and Pennsylvania alongside sauerkraut and noodle dishes. The German tradition splits between dumplings made from raw grated potato and those from cooked potato, and this is firmly the cooked sort, with the refinement of baking rather than boiling to keep the flesh dry. The economy of the thing is easy to read: leftover baked potatoes, stale bread, a scrap of suet from the butcher and one egg produce a filling side dish that stretches a small piece of meat and its gravy across more plates. The nutmeg or mace is characteristic, and is often said to be a survival of the period when sweet spices were used freely with starches and root vegetables rather than reserved for baking.