I was wondering if this was a regional dish or a family dish.
Mom has made “Chicken and Neffly” (NEFF-lee) as long as I can remember. You boil the chicken and shred it into chunks. Then you make neffly in the broth. Neffly is somewhere between home-made noodles and dumplings. Kinda like ribble, only bigger.
Flour, milk and egg. That’s all that’s in it. You mix it up into a paste and gloop it into the boiling broth, cutting it off into thumb sized globs. Boil it till it’s firm.
Mom got the recipe from Dad’s Mom. I guess it’s of German extraction. As far as I know, it’s always made with chicken.
Have you ever heard of this?
Have you ever had this?
Do you know how to spell this?
Does your family eat anything odd that none of your friends have ever heard of?
-Rue
Kinda like spatzels, but it’s a little different. The main difference is we don’t call it “spatzel”. More of a jumbo-spatzel, too. (Asuming the one time I had actual spatzel, it was a representitive batch.)
To make neffly? No. It’s just flour, egg and milk. I’ll have to ask my Mom for the amounts, but I think it’s like: 1 cup flour, 1 egg, and enough milk to make it gooey (maybe 1/4 cup?) You mix it all up in a bowl, then you let it ooze out into the boiling broth, hacking off chunks as it oozes.
I can still hear the “shhhish, shhhish” of Mom’s knife against the neffly bowl.
Whenever my grandmother went away my Swedish grandfather would make dumplings that sound remarkably like this Neffly of which you speak. I can’t remember what he called them.
I always thought that this was the only thing he knew how to cook.
Google search on ‘Neffly’ turned up nothing, but when I seached for ‘nefli’ I got numerous hits, trouble is they’re not in english and I can’t even tell if they are talking about food.
I think you’re talking about knepfli. Every recipe I’ve seen uses a spaetzle maker, so unless the batter is thinner (making them larger?) or thicker, it’s probably just a matter of dialect.
Woo! My first solid lead! “Knepfli” That’s about the only spelling variations I didn’t plug into Google. (I tried “neffly” too, and “kneffly”, “nephly”, “knefflie”, “knefli”, etc.)
DMC, yeah it’s probably dialect. And someone lost their spaetzel maker at one time, so they started the “dump and cut” method. Wooo… I’m a little too excited about this little piece of my childhood, but, heh, it’s not just some goofy thing my family threw together in The Depression. (Although that would make a cool Family Story.)
[singing tunelessly]
Dopers are so cool… Dopers are so smart… La la la la…[/singing tunelessly]
-Rue
Thanks to DMC, I got shot out in the right direction. Google search of “Knepfli” got me a whole whopping 5 websites. And they were all in some furrin language. (And I didn’t take the 4 seconds for a translation.) So, onto a “Spaetzel” search.
Found a recipe for chicken & German noodle soup. That would be the chicken & neffly from my childhood. Only the noodles were extruded instead of cut- no biggie. (Mangetout, if you want a recipe really close to Mom’s, go there.) I also found a double sized recipe for spaetzel that was dead on Mom’s, but I lost the link. (I closed a page instead of minimizing it, and didn’t notice till too late.)
Flour, milk, eggs and boiling water are probably the most comman ingredients ever. No wonder they get slapped together so often. And called so many things. Spaetzel, ribble, dumplings, knepfli, whatever Feynn’s grandfather called it, etc…
fenrir, don’t think I’m blowing you off with your initial “spatzel” reference. I checked some spatzel/spaetzel recipes, and they all had more stuff in them. Spices and things. And the whole press angle threw me. It wasn’t untill DMC’s post that I dug deeper into the recipes and found “basic” (read “boring”) spatzel. Heck, the recipe I linked just calls them “German noodles”. You were my “first solid lead” for the recipe, but I stopped short. And DMC let me know there was really something out there with the right name.
Thus ends a thread, unless you have a knepfli-related anecdote you want to share.
Out on a limb here, but do you think there’s any linguistic link between Knoepfle and Gnocci ? (I know they aren’t the same thing, but they are somewhat similar - I’m just wondering if the name might have evolved from one to the other at the same time as the ingredients evolving to include potato.
Knoepfle seems to be another member of the family. Just another varient of this rather standard peasant foodý.
knepfli…knoepfle…gnocci… Yeah, there seems to be a thread running through here. People move around, share recipes, “Oh cripes! We can’t get ________ here! Whatta we got?”, the recipes change and evolve. Local people put there own accent on the name, and poof you have 1,001 different names for (essentially) the same dish.
Someone passing through (say) Bavaria gets this recipe, but it calls for wheat flour. By the time they get to (also say) northern Italy, they’re all out of flour. The local people boil up these potatoe thingies and mash them down to a paste. “Say! That cooks up alot like wheat flour paste.” I’m not saying that gnocci derives from knepfli, or the other way around. The two just seem to be related. Trade between countries and different peoples is a good thing.
Tracing the relationships of food would be as interesting as tracing your family tree. But much harder.
-Rue
ý My Dad hates it when I call this “peasant food”. Like I’m knocking it or something. “It’s just using up all of something and not letting anything go to waste.” he says.
That’s what “peasant food” is. It’s what you eat when you’re hungry. Not what you fix to impress the in-laws. If people could afford an extra chicken, would they extend what they had with boiled flour-paste? If people could afford an extra pig, would we have goetta? {a local dish, sausage extended with pin oats- very yummy}
This is wonderful, I’m learning so much about foods I’d never heard of before (like Goetta, for which, I suppose the nearest equivalent in my part of the world will be haggis or Irish white pudding)
I am in the process of creating a food-based website, so this is all good info.
I didn’t have any chicken handy, so I improvised (after all that’s the whole ‘peasant food’ ethic anyway isn’t it?), I made a fairly standard lamb stew and simmered it for a couple of hours, I glooped in the batter (1 cup flour, 1 egg, half cup milk) in by pouring and scraping off with a knife (the same sort of action as when you trim pie pastry), it made a variety of sized and shaped lumps, the broth also thickened up wonderfully.
On the whole, it was a huge success and I’ll definitely be doing it again, maybe next time, I’ll pour the batter into the broth through a fine funnel or something, so that I get something more stringy like noodles.
Thanks for introducing me to my latest taste experience.
OK, my Mom’s recipe for dumplings is a little different, but not much. I wanna say 1 3/4 cups o’ flour, an egg, some milk, and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder. Drop in spoonfulls into simmering chicken stock. Cook 'em til they float. They’re my most complete, total comfort food.
Mom used to put 'em in Chicken soup, but when I make 'em, I say to hell with the chicken, carrots, onions, etc. I just want the broth & dumplings. All else is superficial and extraneous. Dumplings are the thing.
I have a vague notion that other people consider dumplings something different - something stuffed or fried. But to the day I die, the above is what I’ll consider dumplings.