Germknodel

A Germknödel is a large half-round dumpling of yeast dough, filled with Powidl, a thick plum butter. It's boiled in salted water or steamed over it, then served under melted brown butter with a mix of ground poppy seed and icing sugar. Germ is the Austrian and Bavarian word for yeast, and Vienna's tourism board traces it to gären, to ferment.

German Wikipedia says the dumpling reached Vienna from Bohemia, probably in the 18th century, when many Bohemian cooks worked in Viennese households. Austrian cookbooks record it from the 19th century, and by 1880 it counted as an everyday dish. Vienna's tourism board adds that the city's pastry kitchens already loved yeast dough in the 17th century and that pressed yeast, invented in 1847 by the Viennese brewer Adolf Ignaz, made the dough far easier to make.

Its relative the Dampfnudel is cooked in a covered pot with milk and butter in Bavaria, or with salted water and fat in the Palatinate, until a crust forms on the bottom. Both regions claim it, and German Wikipedia records a 2008 complaint from the Rhineland-Palatinate farm minister after Bavaria listed the Dampfnudel as a Bavarian speciality. Munich's ministry replied that it had no plans to seek EU protection for it.