Last wednesday, I went for a little stroll into the English Garden in Munich. It was dark and a little scary as very few people were around at first. But then, I detected a tiny little Christmas market, far away from the crowded, touristy places in town. I had a wonderful plate of “Kässpatz’n” or “Kässpätzle”, a local recipe from southern Germany – or, from the Alemannic region, to be precise (which is not all Germany of course).
I was looking for an English translation which led me into a funny discussion at leo.org, because it seems to be not so clear how to describe it, even for German speakers who try to describe the “Spätzle” part of it. Anyway, here is what I found:
I, as a non-southern German, would translate the word to something like “cheesy sparrows” which will make the Alemannic folks yelp with pain. But I cannot help it, the word “Spatz” is a synonym for sparrow (Sperling)…
But I learned from the discussion that it is NOT swabian spaghetti with cheese, as Spätzle don’t have anything to do with spaghetti. They are prepared as a fluffy dough which is then spread onto a wooden cutting board in a thin layer and finally scraped – thread by thread – with a dough scraper into the boiling water. So maybe you could call it a long lost cousin of the Italian noodles because it has water and flour and eggs, but then the commonalities seem to end. Some trend to be observed was “dumplings”, but that was objected against by the experts as well.
However you call it – believe me, it is RICH – both in taste as in calories, but it is just too good to resist, especially on a cold night with a drizzle, indecisive between rain and snow. You take those spätzle, some (many) crispy roasted onions, pepper and some really great cheese like Emmentaler or Appenzeller which you melt in a hot pan until it’s all melted and mixed and nice and smelly. Although Gouda does definitely not belong to the right geographic origin, I can imagine it beeing good with some that stuff as well (must be old and strong, though).
But this does not explain the title of this post – hence here it comes:
Part 1: Far-away-view….
Part 2: Close-up… 🙂
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