Plum Dumplings (Zwetschkenknödel): A Jewish Viennese Story of Memory, Nuts, and Tradition (Vegan Soy Skyr Recipe)

In Vienna, plums aren’t just fruit—they’re tiny vessels of history, ethics, and memory. These vegan Zwetschkenknödel take a centuries-old Jewish Viennese tradition, shake it up with soy skyr and toasted nuts, and dare you to question what “authentic” really means. One bite, and you’re tasting history, mischief, and a hint of philosophical rebellion—all rolled into a perfect dumpling.

[Jump to the Recipe]

The Story Behind the Dumpling: Jewish Memory, Viennese Tradition & Ethical Vegan Reinvention.

There is something fundamentally absurd about writing a vegan recipe for Zwetschkenknödel—plum dumplings—in Vienna in 2025. Not because veganism itself is absurd (though plenty of my neighbors and fellow Jews would argue otherwise), but because the very act of veganizing this dish forces us to confront a series of uncomfortable truths about memory, authenticity, and what it means to cook Jewish food in a city that spent considerable energy erasing the Jews who once cooked it. Even today, Zwetschkenknödel are not a niche historical curiosity; they are a wildly popular, quintessential Austrian comfort food, a classic served in high-end Mehlspeisen shops and humble Beisls (popular taverns) alike, a ubiquitous symbol of a carefree Viennese summer and autumn. Every attempt to cook their food now is, inevitably, an act of mourning disguised as a recipe.

Jewish Ingenuity: Pareve Coatings & the Ethics of Adaptation

Let me be clear about what we’re dealing with. Zwetschkenknödel are not originally Jewish. They are thoroughly, unapologetically Austrian—a dish of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that transcended religious and ethnic boundaries, eaten by Catholic peasants and Protestant aristocrats alike. The empire was a mosaic of peoples and cuisines, and dumplings traveled freely among ethnic and class lines, appearing in kitchens from Prague to Budapest, from Vienna to Lemberg. But the Jews of Vienna, like Jews everywhere, took what was local and made it theirs. This wasn’t adaptation for convenience; it was adaptation despite inconvenience. Jewish cooks embraced a fundamentally non-Jewish dish and made it fit within the constraints of kashrut, even when that meant creating an entirely separate category of meal around it.

The coating, however, that’s where Jewish ingenuity shines: dry-toasted nuts instead of butter-fried breadcrumbs, a technique we first learned while living in Israel. This adaptation serves a dual purpose: it adds remarkable complexity, and most importantly, it functions perfectly as a pareve coating, allowing the dumpling (made with potato dough, for example) to be served alongside a meat meal. This is its kashrut function foremost. We saw this not only with fruit dumplings but also applied to other popular dishes, like a delicious coating for roasted cauliflower. This method creates a coating that is simultaneously crunchy, oily, and subtly sweet from the nuts’ natural sugars. It’s the result of using no fat, no sugar, just finely ground nuts toasted until they release their oils and turn fragrant and golden. It’s everything the traditional breadcrumb coating aspires to but never quite reaches. In this act of adaptation, one can already see a profound ethical ingenuity: the responsibility to do right within the constraints you face, an ethics enacted through the very act of making food. Just as our forebears adapted the dish to fit the strictures of kashrut, we now add a third constraint with a Jewish vegan adaptation, layered with its own modern ethical and health implications.

What I’m offering you isn’t a “Jewish recipe” in the sense of something that originated in Jewish kitchens, but rather a Jewish version of a Viennese classic—and now, a Jewish vegan adaptation of that version. This puts us at three degrees of separation from whatever “authentic” might mean. The question is whether this distance is a corruption or simply the continuation of a tradition that was always about adaptation, translation, and making do with what you had in front of you. It’s a culinary process where culture persists in its traces, surviving as fragments and shards—old techniques reassembled by the attentive hand—rather than as a pristine original.

A Culinary Talmud: Jewish Logic, Viennese Foodways & the Art of Distinctions

The traditional Jewish Viennese approach to fruit dumplings was structured by its own internal logic, though local traditions varied wildly. While the foundational choice of dough often followed kashrut—Topfen (curd cheese) dough for a dairy meal, potato dough for a meat meal, or a pareve starch dough (like semolina or yeast) for flexibility—the specific fruit pairings became a source of passionate debate. In some Jewish households, this meant that apricots paired strictly with potato dough, while plums were typically reserved for Topfen. These were the kind of culinary laws certain grandmothers enforced with the severity of a halakhic interpretation—a tradition-bound severity that was not always driven by kashrut but by a deeply personal conviction about proper taste and composition.

The nut coating, made without butter, provided richness without violating dietary law—and, to my mind and the minds of several contemporary Jewish chefs, it is simply much tastier—creating a depth of flavor that the traditional coating rarely achieves. In this way, a vegan iteration doesn’t sever itself from Jewish logic; it mirrors it—substitution, constraint, and invention born of restriction. Just as our forebears adapted the dough, often using potato, to make the dumpling pareve and therefore compatible with a meat meal, our vegan version achieves the same functional goal. It’s precisely this kind of ethical and practical creativity that links past and present: our forebears worked within laws they interpreted as divine, while we work within ethical frameworks we interpret as secular but no less binding.

The very word for dumpling in Yiddish—knaidl or kneidl—derives from the German Knödel, a linguistic borrowing that traveled from Medieval German through Western Slavic environments into Jewish kitchens. That etymological journey tells us everything we need to know about Jewish Viennese food: it was always hybrid, always adaptive, always a negotiation between local ingredients and Jewish dietary law. 

Even the debates around food spoke to what I can only call culinary Talmudism—and I use that term deliberately, not cutely. The Talmud is, at its core, an extended argument about how to live ethically within a system of constraints, where interpretation itself becomes a form of devotion and every detail matters because God (supposedly) resides in details. Jewish Viennese food culture replicated this argumentative structure in secular form: passionate debates arose over whether Zwetschkenröster, the plum compote often served with plain curd cheese dumplings (Topfenknödel) as a non-meat meal, counted as a compote or an entirely separate category of food (a debate that sounds ridiculous until you realize it’s about how we define belonging). This wasn’t pedantry—or rather, it was pedantry elevated to philosophy. Classification itself became a form of belonging, a way of asserting that these distinctions mattered, that how you categorized and prepared food was inseparable from who you were. The need to classify and interpret, to argue and refine, to make ever-finer distinctions—this is Talmudic reasoning applied to the kitchen, where the text being interpreted is taste itself.

The Plums of Defiance: Memory, Political Resonance & the Hard ‘K’

Even the plums themselves, the very fruit that gives these dumplings life, carry historical overtones that refuse to fade. Traditionally, these autumn plums were a source of sweetness and celebration, served in tarts for the Jewish High Holidays—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As food historian Gil Marks observes in his Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, plums held a special place in Ashkenazic kitchens, ripening just in time for the New Year and finding their way into everything from preserves to pastries and brandies—a late-summer abundance transfigured into ritual sweetness.

Yet, in contemporary Austria, this simple dessert takes on an unintentionally sinister political resonance. The color scheme of the plum tart—the dark blue fruit against a brown crust—unwittingly echoes the colors of modern and historical political extremism: blue represents Austria’s surging right wing; brown, of course, stands for the Nazis. Eating a plum tart in Vienna today is therefore more than just a seasonal treat; it becomes an act of culinary defiance, a small gesture of consuming—literally—the colors that once consumed us. It is, in a profound sense, an act of ethical testimony, an embodied statement against erasure and a reclamation of the very landscape they sought to dominate.

The specific plum variety traditionally used, the Hauszwetschke, is a local type of blue plum so dark it appears almost black. However, we are not particular about using only this exact variety; we are fiercely particular about taste. We always go to the market, taste all the fruits available, and will only use the very best plums, no matter the variety. The word Zwetschken itself is spelled with a hard “K” in Vienna rather than the softer “G” used elsewhere, because Viennese speakers—my family included—seem to love the explosive precision that the “K” sound provides. This hard ‘K’ is likely not purely Germanic; it is an echo of the dish’s Slavic origins, reflecting the Czech/Bohemian word Švestka, which was carried into the empire’s kitchens. Try saying it aloud: Zwetschken. It’s onomatopoeia for defiance, a small linguistic assertion of local identity in a language that spent decades trying to erase difference. Even in English, plum carries its own weight, beginning with a plosive ‘P’ that mirrors the fruit’s tendency to burst with flavor. In this way, even pronunciation becomes a form of ethical and cultural resistance, echoing the idea that language and food are inseparable carriers of memory.

Structure as Ethics: From Kashrut to Veganism

The real innovation—or recovery—is the precise execution. The formula my wife Michaela and I arrived at—a precisely calibrated mixture of walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts in a 50-25-25 ratio, with no added fat or sugar—is our own obsessive refinement. When you roll the hot dumplings in this mixture, the residual moisture causes the nuts to adhere, turning an old substitution into a quietly radical one. In a way, it mirrors the Jewish philosophical principle that the ordinary, handled with care and attention, can become sacred. In Hasidic thought—most clearly in the Tanya—this is called avodah b’gashmiyut, service through the material: the sanctification of the everyday through mindful transformation. Our veganism, in that light, becomes a secular echo of that mystical idea—elevating life not by dominating it, but by refusing to dominate at all.

Our veganism, however, has nothing to do with keeping kosher. I am, as I’ve written elsewhere in my essay “How I Became an Atheist in a Shtreimel,” someone who performs Jewish cultural identity without believing in the theological infrastructure that once gave it meaning. My veganism is motivated by contemporary ethical concerns that would have been incomprehensible to my great-grandparents, who considered a meat dinner the height of luxury. Yet here’s what strikes me: both kashrut and veganism function as ethical systems that create meaning through constraint. Both say: the world is full of things you could eat, but you will not eat them all. Both transform the mundane act of eating into an ethical practice, where every meal becomes an opportunity to enact your values. Both require constant vigilance, interpretation, and substitution. The difference is only in what we’re protecting: kashrut guards the boundaries between categories that Jewish law deems sacred; veganism guards the boundaries between species that secular ethics deems worthy of moral consideration. But the structure—the daily practice of refusal and adaptation, the engineering of pleasure within limits—is identical. When I use soy skyr instead of Topfen, when I toast nuts without butter, I’m not abandoning Jewish culinary logic; I’m extending it. I’m doing exactly what Jewish cooks have always done: taking what the world offers and asking, “How can I make this work within the constraints I’ve accepted as binding?”

The Vanished Table: Erasure, Contradiction & the Mahler Moment

Before we dive into the recipe, it’s worth remembering what these dumplings once were. They are rooted in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, arising from the region’s abundant stone fruit harvests in late summer and early fall. This created a democratic culinary appeal—rare in a society that otherwise maintained rigid class hierarchies—where the dumpling became simultaneously fancy and humble, festive and everyday, finding its way from peasant tables to imperial ones.

The dumpling tradition itself survived the war, of course—thriving, in fact, as a cornerstone of contemporary Austrian cuisine. Walk through Vienna today and you’ll find Zwetschkenknödel on menus everywhere, from tourist-trap Gasthäuser to acclaimed restaurants, their origins scrubbed clean of any Jewish association. What didn’t survive were most of the Jews who once made them, too. The food became “Austrian” in the absence of the people who helped shape its tradition.

In pre-Shoah Vienna, Gustav Mahler—that tortured convert who never quite escaped his Jewish origins—reportedly declared his sister’s apricot dumplings his absolute favorite dish. Think about what that means: a man capable of orchestrating cosmic tragedy and transcendence in his symphonies, reduced to sibling nostalgia over fruit wrapped in potato dough. But perhaps that’s precisely the point. The same attention to timing that makes a dumpling sublime—knowing when the water has reached not a rolling boil but that bare simmer, understanding that ten seconds too long turns tender into leaden—is the same attention that transforms notes into revelation. Mahler’s genius wasn’t separate from his dumpling-eating childhood; it was formed by it. 

There’s something distinctly Austrian about that kind of precision—the almost moral seriousness with which timing, texture, and proportion are treated. From Mahler’s metronomic tempos to Musil’s “sense of possibility,” Austrian culture has long prized exactitude as an ethical mode. It’s not far, really, from the halakhic spirit: the belief that holiness—or, in the secular sense, meaning—resides in the finest distinctions. A dumpling, like a law, is either right or not yet right.

The Archive of Gluttony: Precision, Scarcity & the Engineering of Dough

There are stories—perhaps apocryphal, but aren’t all the best stories?—of dumpling-eating contests in Vienna, where one man reportedly consumed thirty dumplings. This is the kind of competitive gluttony that characterized pre-war Jewish Vienna, where abundance, when it finally arrived, was embraced with the fervor of people who remembered scarcity.

The world record now stands at 191 dumplings, set in Czechoslovakia—not Vienna, but one of the Eastern European territories from which so many Viennese Jews originally came. That geographic shift is itself a kind of memorial: a small echo of the larger migrations and erasures that scattered dumpling traditions across borders. The need to quantify even gluttony, to establish records and rankings for something as ephemeral as eating—this too is characteristically Austrian, perhaps even Talmudic: the conviction that measurement itself constitutes meaning, that documenting how many dumplings can be consumed is a way of asserting that dumplings, and by extension the people who eat them, matter.

There’s an absurdist poetry to this: thirty dumplings as both achievement and excess, carnival and archive. In a culture that would soon be exterminated with bureaucratic precision, the impulse to record even festive abundance takes on an unintended poignancy. They counted everything—the dumplings eaten, the laws observed, the trains departing. Some records preserve joy; others document annihilation. We’re left with both.

To bridge that historical memory with our modern constraints, the dumpling dough itself must become an act of precise engineering. My recipe uses soy skyr—a fermented soy product that approximates the tang and thickness of Topfen (curd cheese)—because I am trying to create something tender without using dairy. The addition of wheat semolina and regular breadcrumbs creates structure and airiness while keeping the flour content low. This is a dumpling dough as an engineering problem: a balance of hydration and protein calibrated precisely enough to encase a whole fruit without collapsing during twenty minutes of gentle poaching. The dough must be mixed but never kneaded—overworking it activates gluten too aggressively, creating toughness where we need pillowy softness.

Culinary Archaeology: Bringing Text Back to Tongue

Traditional Zwetschkenknödel days were once among the happiest of the year: gorgeous autumn weather, the heady scent of fruit and spice, everyone jolly—a true harvest celebration. Today, the dumplings themselves remain as popular as ever—every Viennese knows them, eats them, loves them. But the connection between contemporary Vienna’s Jews and this food is severed, largely historical rather than living. Those who once sat at the same table—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish—eating the same dumplings, arguing over the proper dough consistency with equal passion, are gone. What remains for Jews is a kind of culinary archaeology: not reconstructing a lost dish, but reconstructing our place at a table that continued without us. The evidence is fragmentary—old cookbooks, survivor testimonies, faintly remembered gestures—because what needs recovery isn’t the recipe itself but the memory that Jews were once equal participants in this tradition. This is food as Kaddish—the prayer for the dead that never mentions death.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett once wrote in her essay “Kitchen Judaism” that Jewish culture survived as text more than as taste—that the Holocaust and subsequent assimilation transformed lived foodways into archived recipes, embodied knowledge into documentary evidence. What was once grandmother’s hands shaping dough became cookbooks published by survivors, oral tradition converted to written instruction out of desperate preservation. The kitchen, once the most immediate and sensory site of Jewish culture, became something you read about rather than inhabited.

Recreating these dumplings is an act of reversal—bringing text back to tongue. This effort suggests that culture persists not just in its written traces but in its revival, that the gap between archive and embodiment can be bridged through care, repetition, and a willingness to accept approximation. This isn’t nostalgia—it’s forensic work. Cooking becomes a way of identifying cultural fingerprints left in the dough, of taking documentary evidence and asking: can this be made to live again?

The Inheritance of Erasure: Theft, Forgetting & the Missing Chairs

Vienna today markets itself as the city of Mozart and Sachertorte, of grand palaces and coffeehouse culture—a culture that was, in fact, profoundly multi-ethnic, created at a table where Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all sat together, eating the same foods, refining the same techniques, arguing over the same culinary questions. Jews didn’t invent Zwetschkenknödel, but they were full participants in the culture that perfected them. They contributed their innovations—the nut coating, the debates over dairy versus pareve dough, the Talmudic intensity brought to questions of timing and texture. And then they were systematically murdered, their neighbors complicit or silent, their contributions erased along with their lives.

What happened next wasn’t exactly theft—you can’t steal what was already shared. It was something more insidious: erasure through convenient forgetting. The table continued, the dumplings remained, but the memory that Jews had once sat there as equals, as contributors, as arguers and refiners and passionate eaters—that memory was actively suppressed, quietly edited out of the story Vienna told itself. The silverware and porcelain left behind in emptied apartments were stolen and simply absorbed into other households, the empty chairs removed, and the meal went on as if it had always been exclusively Austrian, as if the Jewish presence had been merely incidental rather than integral. Vienna inherited Jewish contributions to its food culture the way heirs inherit from the murdered: by taking possession while denying both the crime and the provenance.

The Diasporic Dumpling: Continuity, Revival & the Scatter of Tradition

Vienna’s Jewish community today is small but very much alive—a thriving community that includes everyone from Orthodox families to secular cultural Jews. Jews find themselves in a strange position: insisting on a continuity that the dominant culture would prefer to forget, claiming their place at a table where they have always belonged but where their historical presence has been systematically minimized. They are not ghosts haunting a dead past; they are living participants in an ongoing culture, demanding acknowledgment of a contribution that never stopped, even when most of the contributors were murdered.

So yes: I’m making vegan plum dumplings with soy skyr and a nut coating that breaks all the traditional rules. I’m using stevia instead of sugar because I’m interested in recipes that don’t spike blood glucose. I’m specifying measurements in grams because precision matters when you’re working with dough this delicate. And I’m telling you to cook these dumplings at a bare simmer for exactly twenty minutes, checking them after ten to ensure they haven’t stuck to the pot, because these details—these tiny, obsessive, grandmother-approved details—are what separate a good dumpling from a sublime one.

I cannot promise you that making these dumplings will recreate that vanished world of pre-war Jewish Vienna. But I can promise you this: the moment you bite through that tender, slightly sweet dough into the hot, tart plum interior, and then get that crunchy hit of toasted nuts—in that moment, you’ll understand why it is necessary to taste the uncomfortable inheritance of this dish, connecting its present popularity to the Jewish community that was chased and murdered.

These dumplings, like all the best Jewish food, are about making something beautiful from whatever you have, adapting traditions to new circumstances while maintaining enough connection to the past that you can still taste memory in every bite. They are imperfect, hybrid, and—if you execute them properly—transcendent. Which is to say: they’re exactly what Jewish food has always been.

The work of reinvention continues beyond Vienna in the expected places. Contemporary Israeli chefs—Erez Komarovsky, Gil Hovav, and others—occasionally reinterpret Ashkenazic fruit dumplings as “heritage desserts,” serving dishes their grandparents ate in Vienna or Warsaw in restaurants in Tel Aviv and the Galilee. There’s something both moving and strange about this: a dumpling born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, perfected in Jewish Viennese kitchens, murdered along with its cooks, resurrected in the Middle East by their descendants. The dumpling becomes diasporic in multiple directions—eastward from Austria, then southward to Israel, now circling back through Jewish culinary memory to Vienna again, where I stand in my kitchen making a vegan version with soy skyr.

I take comfort in that scatter. To cook a dumpling in 2025—whether in Vienna, Tel Aviv, or New York—is not nostalgia but participation, a small act within a living, evolving tradition that refuses to stay buried or fixed. The dumpling travels because Jews traveled, because we were forced to travel, because we keep traveling. And wherever we land, we adapt the dough.

Now: buy the best plums you can find. Taste one before you commit. Make the dough. Wrap each fruit with care. Boil them gently. Roll them in nuts. Dust them with sugar. Eat them hot. And for a moment, as the plum releases its juice and the nuts crunch between your teeth, you’ll be eating history—complicated, uncomfortable, delicious history that refuses to be forgotten.

Zwetschken with a hard K. Say it like you mean it.

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