Grandma Helga's bacon dumplings

Ingredients for 8 servings:

• 5 kg potatoes
• 500 g flour
• 300 g bacon, fattier
• 5 onions
• 4 tbsp salt for the cooking water
• e.g. salt and pepper
• e.g. parsley

Instructions

Working time approx. 1 hour 15 minutes; Cooking/baking time approx. 15 minutes; Total time approx. 1 hour 30 minutes

an old dish made with few ingredients

First, peel the potatoes and store them in a large pot of water. Then clean them and pat them dry. Fill the pot 3/4 full with water and heat it gently on the stovetop; do not boil yet. Now, using a food processor, finely grate the potatoes into a large bowl, not too coarsely or into sticks. Occasionally add a squeeze of lemon juice, as the acid prevents the starch from turning the dough grey. From here on, it gets strenuous, and it’s a good idea to work in pairs. You’ll now need a few thin dish towels to squeeze the water out of the dough. That’s why you need so many potatoes, because you’ll be squeezing out most of the water. To do this, work over the sink and spread out a large, thin dish towel in the sink. Put two handfuls of dough in the middle of the towel, twist and squeeze. Just enough so that the towel doesn’t tear. When hardly any drops come out, put the squeezed potatoes in another large bowl. At the same time, a second person can begin to gradually mix the flour into the freshly squeezed dough. This, too, really only works by hand and is quite strenuous. The 500g is a rough estimate for the flour. Work by feel until the dough reaches a good consistency. Now the water in the pot needs to be salted properly, otherwise no salt will get into the dough. So, the 4 tablespoons of salt here is more of an estimate. Gradually, with your hands, roll or squeeze the dough into a kind of sausage – about the size of croquettes – and drop them into the gently simmering salted water. Check after a few minutes to see if the dumplings are holding their shape. Otherwise, for the remaining dumplings, you might want to knead in more flour and press the dough together more firmly. Stir only infrequently and carefully. At the same time, in a large pan, fry the finely diced (approx. 5mm) fatty bacon until translucent, then add about 5 onions of the same size. Once all the dumplings are in the salted water, let them simmer for another 10 minutes with the lid on. If that’s not right, work in two batches. As soon as the dumplings float to the top, that’s a sign they’re done. Be careful: if the water boils too vigorously, they’ll break. Then, scoop out the finished dumplings one by one from the salted water and place them in one of the large bowls (rinsed in between). Finally, pour the browned onions and bacon over the dumplings and gently fold them in. The bacon dumplings are now ready to serve. Sprinkle salt, pepper, and parsley over the plate if desired. Leftover bacon dumplings taste great the next day, pan-fried! This is a poor man’s meal from wartime, when there weren’t many other ingredients at home. Nowadays, we make the effort to make this dish every three months. Not because it’s so cheap, but because it’s simply so incredibly delicious! It’s not uncommon for other family members to join in. The kitchen usually resembles a battlefield afterward, but it’s worth it. Grandma Helga always told us that the next day, they always had a “Rabschesuppe” (Rabsche soup). Meat sausage (or something similar—whatever was available or needed to be used up) was added to the salted water in which the dumplings were simmering, which gained consistency from the potato starch. Seasoned again with salt and pepper, they supposedly had another dish. Similar to chicken soup and chicken fricassee.