14

I'm not sure if dish identification is on-topic with this site, so feel free to correct me if it isn't.

I have some older German-descended family members who make a traditional dish I would like to find more information on. The dish itself is pretty basic. A simple egg/flour-based bread dough is flattened, sliced into triangular or freeform pieces, shortly boiled in water, and then fried in oil. The bread can sometimes be salted or contain other seasoning. The bread is served with minced and fried Tuna patties or other Tuna dishes, and is eaten with the fish, often with lemon juice sprinkled onto the bread and fish. Its a dry and savory/sour dish, meant to be shared by a group. Ive also been told it was a dish made during impoverished times.

My family members say this dish is called (a word I don't know the spelling of, neither do they) something that sounds like Nymph or Nypp / Nyff (closest German word I can find is Kniff). Its a recipe that has been passed orally through a couple family lines so the actual word may be lost. For the life of me I cannot find information about this dish anywhere on the internet. Ive described the dish, searched dishes made by the locals, searched for dishes prepared in a similar manner, but I can't find anything that matches the description of it.

I was curious if any well-known traditional dishes matched or were similar to this.

enter image description here

enter image description here

Improve this question
12
  • 1
    Is that a cooked bread dough or is it raw? If so it sounds like a variant on gnocchi, knoedel, kloesse, which are more or less the same thing. There are lots of regional variants, so if you know which part of Germany, that will help narrow it down. Commented May 8, 2025 at 21:16
  • 2
    Might be Knoepfle pronounced nurffla, though those are just boiled I think. Commented May 8, 2025 at 21:21
  • 9
    Tangentially related: (if you’re from the US/anywhere not Germany) it could also be an immigrant-specific food. I learned semi-recently that the “kuchen” (which is just German for “cake”) recipe in my family was specifically from the wave of German immigrants to the North/South Dakota region (known as “Dakota kuchen”). It’s not a traditional German dessert AFAIK. I give this anecdote to show that your recipe could well be another such situation, if nothing turns up about it being a traditional German dish. Commented May 8, 2025 at 22:08
  • 1
    @bob1 Its a standard bread dough. The exact recipe varies, but its typically boiled like a noodle first, then fried for a short time. Ive added a picture of the dish. We cooked it tonight so I could get some pictures. Commented May 8, 2025 at 22:23
  • 6
    ". The bread is served with minced and fried Tuna patties or other Tuna dishes, and is eaten with the fish, often with lemon juice sprinkled onto the bread and fish." This part strongly hints at at least a decent bit of removal from the original tradition(s) that this dish came from because both lemons but especially tuna are not a thing in traditional German cuisine. The fish simply doesn't live anywhere near here and isn't special enough to be widely imported until very recently Commented May 9, 2025 at 12:04

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
12

I am not aware of any traditional dish like this in Germany. Especially the soaking in water and then frying seems very unfamiliar. For (deep) frying you want your ingredients to be as dry as possible.

As for the name I have no clue, there is „Knifte“ for a slice of bread but no dish I know reminds me of Nymphe.

From the name and the general preparation, I would guess that the dish might be based on a recipe with a more Eastern European or perhaps Jewish cuisine background.

Improve this answer
6
  • 1
    I do believe this is the most likely answer. I asked for some more information and was told that our great uncle came from germany around the time of WWII, which would coincide with the mixed jewish cuisine. Commented May 8, 2025 at 23:33
  • 3
    Boiling and then frying dough is adjacent to boiling and then baking dough, which is bagels, which are usually considered Jewish cuisine... Commented May 9, 2025 at 2:20
  • 5
    As a German native, I don't know of any German dish that uses boiling and then deep frying dough or anything traditional that uses tuna patties. Ground meat patties sure but replacing meat by fish I'm not aware of in any German cooking. Commented May 9, 2025 at 11:20
  • 1
    @quarague Never had a Bremer? For other readers, that's a bread roll with a minced and breaded pollock pattie, remoulade, veggie garnish, and possibly ketchup and crispy fried onions -- named after the port city of Bremen. Commented May 12, 2025 at 7:48
  • @quarague German language has the beautiful word FISCHFRIKADELLE Commented May 13, 2025 at 14:12
8

Alternative interpretation, that fits the dish type and name if not the German origin: it could be a type of Kofta.

In Eurasian cuisine, basically any fried patty is considered a kofta. The prototypical version, also called "meatball" in American English, usually consists of minced meat mixed with soaked bread and bound with egg, heavily spiced. But there are all kinds of variations, including ones made with fish. So, if you showed the dish to anybody from that culinary tradition, it would be recognizable as a kofta, and upon hearing the recipe, doubly so.

Then there is the name. Wikipedia says that the Anglicized name "Kofta" is an Urdu loanword. But in Turkey, where different types of this dish are very popular, the name is written "Köfta", which on the Balkans has mutated to "Kyufta" or "Kyffte", which in German pronunciation is not very far from your supposed Nyff.

The country of origin doesn't fit the name. A modern German would call (the typical) kofta one of several unrelated names: "Fleischklops", "Frikadelle", "Boulete" or "Fleischpflanzerl", with Wikipedia suggesting some more variants, and yours is even more likely to be descriptively called something like "Fischklops". But there is no guarantee that a dish that is popular in your immigrant family stems from their own country of origin. There has always been a lot of cultural exchange throughout Europe over the centuries. So there is a good chance that some great-...-grandma of yours learned the dish from, say, a Turkish person she knew, or even that she was Turkish/Eastern European/Western Asian herself, and that the recipe stayed in the family, with a name that got corrupted over the generations.

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Another family of dishes that possibly could have given rise to this is künefe/knafeh — a Levantine/Turkish sweet dish consisting of pastry/dough and cheese, fried and then doused in syrup. The most widespread version uses kadayif angel-hair pastry so looks rather different, but some variants use simpler doughs and look not dissimilar to OP’s first photograph. The name fits well (closer than anything else yet suggested) — on the other hand all versions I know of are sweet and with cheese. Commented May 11, 2025 at 16:39
2

Another partial match is Knipp. The name and back-story match well — it’s a traditional German poverty food, and I think would be pronounced as Knipf in some dialects — but the dish itself doesn’t match OP’s family’s version very closely: it’s a cheap sausage, consisting of some meat (usually cheap pork parts, from a brief reading around) bulked out with grains (usually oats), typically cut into wide round slices and fried. Conceivably, the tuna patties part of OP’s dish could be a descendent of this, with the tuna having gotten substituted for pork parts as a more cheaply available meat at some stage after the family emigrated?

Improve this answer

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.