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The Czech Republic:
A Dumpling for All Seasons
Central and Eastern Europe à la carte – The Czech Republic
There’s an old fairy-tale about a land of milk and honey that can be reached only by
first eating one’s way through a thick layer of semolina pudding. The Czech version
more likely features a clump of dumpling dough.
There’s really no telling how the Czechs, despite the richness of their cuisine, keep
from resembling their dumplings, which are variously made of potatoes, diced white
bread, semolina, wheat flour or curd cheese. With their delicious fillings of bacon,
meat or various types of fruit, these dumplings are an object of special devotion
on the part of Czech chefs. Any leftover devotion is used in the preparation of roast
pork – the national dish is called vepro-knedlo-zélo, “pork-dumpling-cabbage” –
or svickova, beef fillet in a creamy vegetable sauce, which is accompanied,
of course, by the popular knedliky (German: knödel – a dumpling, what else?).
Did you know that if you make dumpling dough of diced bread you should first
fry the dice in butter? That gives the dish an especially smooth taste. And there is,
indeed, truth to the story about the major contribution that 19 th -century Bohemian
cooks made to Viennese cuisine: Bohemia, today in the Czech Republic, is a real
paradise for mehlspeisen (desserts with flour as the main ingredient), which now
have such Czech-derived Viennese names as palatschinken (crêpes), kolatschen
(yeast pastry with a cheese or sweet filling), buchteln (baked yeast dumplings) and
liwanzen (gâteaux bohémiens). The original recipes fill entire volumes of cookbooks
in Czech libraries.