THE CZECH WAY OF BEING FAT AND HAPPY

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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:

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

‘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.