Kniddelen

Flour, eggs and milk

The dough is simple. Chronicle.lu, describing a ready-made version sold in Luxembourg’s Cactus supermarkets in 2018, lists milk, flour, eggs and salt, mixed into a smooth paste. The recipe published by the Luxembourg City Tourist Office, from chef Ben Weber, uses the same four ingredients, while the version on the government portal luxembourg.public.lu, based on the cook Ketty Thull, enriches the dough with curd and cream.

Each dumpling is formed with a spoon and dropped into simmering salted water. When the Kniddelen float, they are ready to be lifted out and drained.

With bacon, or with butter

The usual finish is bacon. The Luxembourg City Tourist Office describes Kniddelen as typically served with a bacon sauce or melted butter; in Weber’s recipe, streaky bacon is fried in a little butter and the drained dumplings are tossed in the pan and served at once. The government portal finishes them with crisp cubes of smoked bacon and their fat, scattered with chopped parsley or chives, and suggests apple compote on the side and a dry white Moselle wine.

Kniddelen mat Speck, dumplings with bacon, also appear on restaurant menus. The Luxembourg magazine Delano points to it at Um Dierfgen in the capital, and to a whole range of Kniddelen at Beim Zeutzius.

A taste of the farming past

Luxembourg’s everyday traditional dishes come largely from peasant cooking, as Wikipedia’s article on the country’s cuisine notes. The government portal says that the ingredients of Kniddelen mirror Luxembourg’s farming past, when such food was the basis of subsistence for much of the population, and that the dish still recalls meals at grandparents’ tables.

It is above all a dish for the cold months. The portal calls it a treat after a long winter walk, and its guide to Christmas traditions lists Kniddelen as a very popular winter dish made with very few ingredients.

The portal’s recipe follows Ketty Thull, whose first cookbook appeared in 1937 and whose collected recipes were once a standard wedding gift in Luxembourg.

Relatives and new versions

Kniddel is the Luxembourgish name for a dumpling, part of the wide Central European family of Knödel. The Luxembourgish Wikipedia notes local relatives such as Liewerkniddelen, liver dumplings, which Wikipedia’s article on Luxembourg cuisine describes being served with sauerkraut and boiled potatoes.

Chefs still rework the dish. At Expo 2020 in Dubai, Chronicle.lu reported, the Schengen restaurant’s Luxembourgish fusion dishes included homemade Kniddelen with duck breast instead of pork. In Emblem World, Kniddelen sit in the Luxembourg food collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.