A Sweet Dish for Lunch? Nothing Unusual in Czech Cuisine
One of the most charming features of traditional Czech cooking is the idea of a sweet main course. Whoever has yet to taste poppy-seed noodles, bread-pudding or buns with custard topping has yet to explore all the tempting corners of the cuisine’s renowned sweets.
Sweet Dishes That Appeal to All
Far and few are the lands where something sweet is offered as a main course. Yet here the Czech cuisine reaches one of its greatest achievements. Among the typical sweet dishes is the bread pudding known as “žemlovka”. This sweet roll baked to crispness, hiding beneath it an apple filling scented with cinnamon and raisins, is excellent either hot or cold.
Easy to prepare yet highly tasty is rice pudding (rýžový nákyp). Rice baked with milk and preserved fruits, it is exceptional if often overlooked. Yeast-raised buns with the vanilla-cream sauce of “šodó” are particularly loved by children, yet not only by them; the combination of hot custard and delicate buns is irresistible across the ages.
The Dumpling Experts Can Also Make Them Sweet
A more demanding, yet still popular recipe is that of
sweet (yeast or curd) dumplings. These are most often filled with fresh seasonal fruits, from blueberries through plums up to strawberries. Then, these swelling treats are dusted with sugar and drizzled with melted butter or cream. Depending on the region, they can be topped with grated gingerbread, cheese-curds or a pinch of cinnamon.
Another popular sweet dish can be the variants on crepes or pancakes, served with fruit, jam, curd-cheese and whipped cream, sometimes even with ice-cream. Pancakes can be a tasty afternoon snack or a light lunch. A particular reputation is held by the “hunting-lodge pancakes” (lívanečky z myslivny) by the Grand Restaurant Zlatý Lev in Liberec.
Many Other Possibilities Exist for Potato Dough
Traditional sweet uses for potatoes or potato dough are potato dumplings (škubánky) with poppy-seeds or potato-pockets filled with plum butter and topped with breadcrumbs or ground gingerbread. These can be found in truly splendid form in the restaurant “Pod Zámkem” in Průhonice. If you taste them, you will fall under their spell!