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Spatzen
(German Sparrow Cakes.) Make a thick batter of sufficient flour, 1 egg, milk, and some salt. Beat well and spatter it into a pan of boiling fat with a fork, or by dropping through a colander. Cook 5 minutes, drain, and serve as a garnish to dessert, dusted with powdered sugar. May be cooked in water instead, and browned in oven with crumbs.
A one-egg batter fried in fat or boiled and browned — essentially sweetened Spätzle. The original leaves quantities to the cook, so the batter's consistency is the whole recipe.
- "Sufficient flour"For 1 egg, start with about 1 cup (4½ oz) flour, ¼ teaspoon salt and 5–6 tablespoons milk. You want a batter thick enough to cling to a fork in ragged strands but slack enough to fall from it — closer to very stiff pancake batter than to dough.
- Beat it hardThe hinge of the recipe. Spätzle batter is beaten until it is elastic and blisters, several minutes by hand or two on a stand mixer, then rested 10 minutes. Under-beaten batter fries into dense pellets instead of light irregular squiggles.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard or clarified drippings would suit the period; any neutral oil works. Hold it at 350–360F. Higher and the outsides colour before the centres set; lower and they drink fat.
- Five minutes is longAt 350F these small scraps are cooked and golden in about 2 minutes, turned once. Five minutes suggests a cooler fat than a modern thermometer would allow. Fry one first and cut it open.
- The colander methodPress the batter through a colander with holes about ¼ inch, held a few inches above the fat, and scrape across the underside with a spatula. Work in batches so the pieces do not fuse; a wetted spatula and colander help the batter release.
- The boiled versionDrop the strands into well-salted simmering water, not a hard boil, and lift them out with a spider 30–60 seconds after they float. Drain well, then toss in butter with fine dry crumbs and brown in a 400F oven or, more easily, in a skillet.
- Yield and servingOne egg's worth gives about 2 cups cooked — enough to garnish four servings. Dust with confectioners' sugar at the table, since it dissolves on anything still steaming, and consider cinnamon or a spoonful of stewed fruit alongside.
Spatzen is German for sparrows, and the name is the same joke as Spätzle (little sparrows) — the ragged scraps of batter scraped into the pot were thought to look like small birds, though the word is also sometimes traced to a dialect term for a lump or dumpling. Spätzle belongs above all to Swabia, in the southwest, where it is the everyday starch in place of potato or rice; what is unusual here is the sweet treatment, sugared and sent out with dessert rather than under a gravy or with cheese and onions. The alternative given at the end — boil instead of fry, then brown with crumbs — is the more common household handling, and it survives in the buttered-crumb noodle dishes found across Germany, Austria and Hungary.