Not all dumplings were round. The bread dumpling, which was served with meat, was prepared in a half-a-yard-long piece of dough which had the shape of sandwich bread. It was cooked in salted water and slit in one-inch-thick slices by a taut piece of thread. The dumpling was never cut by a knife.
The dumplings which were served for dessert were round and individual, but there their similarity ends. Their size ranged from that of a walnut to that of a grapefruit. They could be at fluffy as a soufflé or as hard as a tennis ball. They were made with or without flour, with boiled potatoes that were unpeeled and pressed, or with raw potatoes that were peeled and grated, with or without yeast, with eggs or with egg yolks only, out of strudel dough or macaroni paste, with milk or with sweet cream or with sour cream. No one has ever recorded all the local and regional varieties. They were filled with whole plums—those were the most famous of all, called svestkove knedliky—with sweet or sour cherries, strawberries, apricots, marmalade, povidla (plum jam), sweet cabbage, nuts, or with nothing. They were served with sugar, or with brown butter, or with cinnamon, or with poppy seed, or with almonds, or with grated cheese, or with practically anything else. Each hostess had her personal recipe, which she wouldn't trade for anything in the world.
My favorite dumplings, the formula for which has been evolved by my wife after years of trial and error, are of the bantam-weight variety. They are made of butter, egg yolks, dry cottage cheese, salt, with just enough flour added to keep the dough from falling to pieces. My wife usually tests a small dumpling first and may add butter or flour to give the dough the needed consistency. It is almost as light as a soufflé, and much better.
Our dumplings are the size of golf balls and are served on very hot plates. They are separated with the fork in small pieces by each guest, and the guest himself performs the ritual of sprinkling them with brown butter, sugar, and grated dry hoop cheese, again with brown butter, hoop cheese, and sugar, which comes this time on top. You may add more layers of brown butter, sugar, and cheese ad infinitum until the dumplings disappear underneath like a landscape under snow. It's a dish for Lucullus.
Another Prague Specialty was hot ham. Of all hams on earth—Parma or Bayonne, Westphalia or Kentucky, York or Poland—the ham of Prague was the best. It was perfectly cured and hardly salted and, like vursty, was eaten hot in the uzenarua. Customers were expected to specify their wishes: lean, half lean, or fat, which side, which cut, with mustard or with horseradish. Fanatic sausage addicts looked upon ham eaters the way disgruntled proletarians look upon members of the long-hair intelligentsia. Ham was far more expensive than sausage. and ham eaters were in a social caste by themselves, except for the very poor people, who would buy a ham bone for little money and make a meal out of it.
Prague's hot ham was one of the all-time delicacies of the cured animal kingdom. The Polish ham, which came quite close to it, never reached its exalted heights of taste and tenderness. Prague's ham was never roasted or baked, only cooked and steamed. It was never served at home. It was a great surprise to my wife and me when we came to America in 1938 and were invited to dinner by the most hospitable people on earth, to be served baked ham. We had to admit that the hams were well cured. In fact, there are Czechs now living in America who maintain that the cured hams of Virginia or Kentucky are better than Prague's hams ever were, but perhaps admiration for their new country out-weighs the memory of their palates.
I returned to Prague in the final days of the second World War as a soldier in the United States Army. It was not a joyful home-coming, and one of my sorrows was what had become of the once-famous sausage shops. Of Prague's uzenarny, many were closed, many had simply disappeared, and the ones that were still open sold next to nothing. Meat had been strictly rationed for years, and pork, the main ingredient of all hot sausages, was obtainable only in the labyrinths of the black market. Some shops had vursty for sale, against ration coupons, but their vursty seemed to be filled with cured sawdust and were a sad imitation of the genuine article.
The meat shortage has never been relieved, except for a brief span in 1946, when UNRRA was active in Prague. By 1950 many sausage shops were bankrupt and had closed their doors. A whole ham had become as rare as a black pearl. Sometimes a ham was served at a diplomatic reception or at the party of a Communist cabinet member. Today in Prague a generation of young people is growing up that doesn't know the difference between vursty, parky, taliany, and klobasy, and cares even less. Prague's hot sausages, like many other far more important things, are only a bittersweet memory of a time which seems so far away now that many people wonder whether it ever existed, except in someone's homesick imaginings.
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