serviettenknödel / tea towel dumpling

A tea towel dumpling is a savoury bread dumpling, about the size of football, sliced and served with stewed meat or lentils. It's an Austrian dish that probably has a cousin in Bavaria or other Eastern European countries.
I got the recipe from my Tirolean aunt who made it without a recipe. I annoyed her no end by trying to measure the ingredients as she used them, but it was the only way I could be sure that I would come home again and know how to make it. It's a tasty, cold weather meal, ideal for anyone who likes bready textures as I do.

First--and most difficult depending on where you live--you'll need 400 g of chewy bread. The best are German buns called Semmel, but I've never found what I'd call a Semmel in Montreal. Here I use a Belgian miche, a round loaf that looks like this:

The recipe calls for old bread torn into small pieces. I tear up fresh bread and let it dry it out for a couple of days. I speed up the process by putting it in the oven at very low heat. You don't want to toast it.
Next you brown chopped onion (one or two depending on your druthers) in oil and add it to the dried bread. Chopped parsley. Salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Half an hour before you want to cook the dumpling, add the wet ingredients which you've mixed:
7 eggs (yes, seven)
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup milk
What I sometimes do is brown the onion in the 1/2 cup oil. That's either a smart or a lazy step.
You let the mixture sit for half an hour so the dry bread absorbs the liquid. Well, of course.
Now comes the tea towel stage. I make this recipe often enough that I have a dedicated dumpling tea towel. Once you've used a tea towel to make a dumpling, you won't want to use it for anything else again. It gets stained during cooking. It never quite loses the smell of onion. I suppose you could bleach it but I'm allergic to bleach and against it on principle, so I've never tried. In fact, even when I wash the tea towel with detergent after I've used it, I then boil it in fresh water to get rid of any detergent residue. There's great potential for neurosis during the choosing and preparation of an appropriate tea towel.

You fold the bottom of the towel over the dough, then fold the top over the bottom. Tie the long ends not too tightly because--with all those eggs--the dumpling will puff out considerably, and a tight knot will only be harder to unknot.

Get a kettle of water boiling and drop in the dumpling. It needs to cook at a simmer for an hour. Less and it won't be done through. More is fine.

Before serving, allow yourself a good few minutes to undo the hot knot. I usually drop the dumpling in the sink and use a knife and fork to fiddle open the tea towel. From the sink onto a serving platter where the dumpling gets sliced.

As I wrote above, this goes well with stew of any variety. Lentils too. It's bready and fluffy and tasty.
I should have taken a photo of a tempting slice of dumpling with stew and vegetables on the plate, but we were too hungry and I forgot.