If you like bread or mashed potatoes, you might really like Knödel.
Even if you don’t like the taste of Knödel, you have to admit they’re fun to make. First, you buy bread and chop it up into little pieces. Then you let the bread get really hard and stale. After that, mix the stale bread, milk, eggs, onion, parsley, and nutmeg together into a big squishy mess. Then you can take the mix and roll it into dumplings the size of tennis balls. Then you let the “tennis balls” boil in salty water. The first time I tried to make Knödel, they exploded in the water and didn’t come out right. Then I asked one of the teachers at my school for help, and she gave me some tips on how to boil them properly.
You can find similar types of dumplings all over Central and Eastern Europe. To figure out why, look at the ingredients. In Southern Germany (where I am) and in other parts of Europe, people traditionally grew a lot of wheat and ate a lot of bread. That’s why so much traditional food is made out of bread, like pretzels.
Imagine you’re a farmer in Germany many years ago, before there were supermarkets. You would put a lot of work into growing wheat and making bread. When your bread got stale, you wouldn’t just throw it away; that would be wasteful. Instead, you might use your stale bread and whatever else you had in your kitchen, like milk or eggs, to make dumplings.
