THE CZECH WAY OF BEING FAT AND HAPPY

Knödel, or Dumplings: Boiled Bread and a Source of Inspiration

THE CZECH WAY OF BEING FAT AND HAPPY

Joseph Lada. Illustration for the novel «The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik»/arthive.com

Gluten intolerance, whether celiac disease, wheat allergy (WA), or non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) has become an increasingly common diagnosis worldwide over the last few decades. Although alarmist estimates put the number of people affected by these conditions at between 0.2 per cent and 6 per cent in different parts of the world, supermarkets everywhere are full of ‘gluten-free’ products. And before you decide that gluten is perhaps your worst enemy, you might want to read on!

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For most of the history of civilization, bread and other flour products have been essential to survival. As humans learned to grow wheat, rye, and other grains, they were increasingly able to defeat one of their worst enemies—hunger. That’s why flour products are so widely consumed around the world.

Pompey, fresco. People buying bread/Alamy

Pompey, fresco. People buying bread/Alamy

Bread That Is Not Baked

We are used to baking bread in a tandoor, a stove, an oven, or an electric bread maker. But you have to build a tandoor or a stove in one place—you can’t simply take them with you when you have a nomadic lifestyle. In that case, wouldn’t it be easier to cook the dough by boiling it in water? That’s why Kazakh naryn, or beşbarmaq, is made with thin sheets of dough cooked in broth. And it is even faster not to roll out the dough and cut it into rounds or noodles, but to boil it just like that, in pieces.

Well, it turns out that many peoples, even those whose ways of life were far from nomadic, have had the same ingenious idea of boiling dough in water or broth. For example, the Chinese food mantou (a soft, white bread bun) has transformed into the Central Asian manti (a kind of dumpling filled with meat), but mantou are originally simply steamed buns that are not always filled.

The knedlik eater in the frescoes of the chapel at Hocheppan Castle/Wikimedia Commons

The knedlik eater in the frescoes of the chapel at Hocheppan Castle/Wikimedia Commons

Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians ate something similar long before Christ, and scholars cannot say for sure who invented it. It is likely that this simple dish was invented independently in different places because the recipe is, after all, easy. As a matter of fact, in the early fifth century, the ancient Roman gourmet Marcus Gabius Apicius in his cookbook De re coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking) described as many as three recipes for cooking balls of a simple dough made from water and flour. In Italy, cooked dough in the form of pasta, became the most iconic national dish, being well beyond its borders. In Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, lazanki (noodles/dumplings) and halušky (thick, soft noodles/dumplings) are eaten with great pleasure.

For the Czechs and Germans, large pieces of boiled dough are also a staple of their national cuisines. The name of the dish is almost identical for both cultures: knödel for the Germans and knedlíky (sing. knedlík) for the Czechs; these words are related to the English word ‘knot’ and the Latin word nōdus, meaning ‘knot’.

Cones versus Dumplings

However, the Czechs adopted the German name only in the nineteenth century. Before that, they mostly called their boiled dumplings buchty or buchtičky. And if you happen to visit East Moravia, don’t be surprised if you see šišky (meaning ‘cones’) on the menu. Don’t worry, you won’t be fed pine or fir seeds! This term pays homage to the region’s linguistic history, which was influenced by Jan Hus,11Jan Hus (circa 1370–1415) was a Czech theologian and philosopher, a rector at the Charles University in Prague, accused of heresy and burned at the stake who was not only a religious reformer and the inspiration for the long and bitter Hussite Wars, but also a linguist. He heartily despised the German word knödel and insisted that the Czechs’ beloved national dish should be referred to in the Moravian manner as šišky. Of course, he was not burned at the stake for his preferences, but in the Czech lands as a whole, the Hussites lost not only in the religious wars, but also in the war of names—the German knödel became the more commonly used name for this popular dish.

 Diebold Schilling the Older, Spiezer Chronik (1485): Burning of Jan Hus at the stake/Wikimedia Commons

Diebold Schilling the Older, Spiezer Chronik (1485): Burning of Jan Hus at the stake/Wikimedia Commons

Dumplings for All Tastes

A dish as simple and usually cheap as dumplings was, of course, primarily the food of the poor. The classic recipe for this dish (flour, yeast, eggs, and salt) dates back to the seventeenth century, and eggs were optional; if you had to conserve food or money, you could do without them. Of course, dumplings could also appear on the tables of the Czech aristocracy; in fact, it was the wealthy who began to complicate the boiled dumpling by adding fillings, mainly various kinds of meat, and pouring sauces over it.

Today, in Prague alone, there are more than sixty types of dumplings made from wheat, rye, buckwheat or rice flours, and they can have potatoes, liver, mushrooms, meat, fish, or vegetables as fillings. Sweet dumplings, made with pieces of berries and fruit, yogurt, or cottage cheese, are also popular.

Czech boiled knedliks/Alamy

Czech boiled knedliks/Alamy

In Karlovy Vary, dumplings are traditionally made from dried bread soaked in milk, and other Czech regions have their own favorite recipes. In Šumava, for example, dumplings are made from potatoes and rye flour, and in South Bohemia, potatoes are the preference. There are even ‘hairy’ (or ‘shaggy’) dumplings, which get their peculiar appearance by adding grated raw potatoes to the flour.

Dumplings in Czech regions are boiled, steamed, and sometimes fried, and this is done either as individual pieces or as a whole loaf, which is sliced when served. The army cooks in Bohemia must have prepared such dumplings in their time, and it was not without reason that in the classic novel The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, there is a scene in which the field chaplain orders Švejk to his lunch, saying:

‘If it’s dumplings, then don’t accept slices off the tip, that’s only a losing deal.’

Hašek was apparently very fond of dumplings in general: the pages of his works are literally peppered with the dish.iThe quotes from Jaroslav Hašek’s The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk (1921) are from the translation by Zdenek K. Sadlon

Joseph Lada. Illustration for the novel «The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik»/arthive.com

Joseph Lada. Illustration for the novel «The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik»/arthive.com

‘My lady miller used to make prune dumplings from potato dough into which she’d add a little farmer’s cheese so that they would be more filling. She always preferred them sprinkled with poppy seed rather than dry curd farmer’s cheese and I liked it just the other way around. So once I slapped her up for that … I did not manage to appreciate my familial bliss.’

Baloun stopped, smacked his lips, swept his tongue over his palate and said sadly and gently, ‘You know, friend, now, when I don’t have them, it seems to me that my wife was right after all, that they are better with poppy seeds.’

Jan Neruda, another icon of Czech literature, claimed in one of his feuilletons that dumplings with plums were the most valuable gift the Czechs have given to the world.

A controversial claim, to be sure, but one that does the dumpling credit.

Yuliya Borovinskaya

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