Marillenknödel

Marillenknödel are a whole apricot wrapped in potato dough, boiled, then rolled in butter-toasted breadcrumbs and sugar. They arrive in high summer, when the Wachau valley's apricots are ripe, and largely disappear again once the season ends.

What it really is

A dough of mashed potato, flour and egg is wrapped around a whole apricot — pit removed, sometimes replaced with a cube of sugar — and shaped into a smooth ball with no seams for the boiling water to find. Once poached until the dough is cooked through and the fruit inside has softened, each dumpling is rolled while still hot through breadcrumbs toasted in butter, then dusted with more sugar.

A little sugar goes inside where the pit was. As the dumpling cooks, that sugar melts into the fruit and concentrates its juice, which is most of what makes the centre taste more intensely of apricot than the raw fruit did.

How it is served

• Whole, two or three to a plate, cut open at the table to release the steam.
• Dusted with more cinnamon sugar and a drizzle of melted butter.
• As a main course in its own right — a Mehlspeise, eaten for lunch rather than only after one.

How to write it on the menu

• Flag gluten, egg and dairy; the potato dough and the buttered breadcrumb coating carry all three.
• Say that they depend on the apricot season; a version made with a different stone fruit outside summer is a genuine substitution worth naming.
• It is naturally vegetarian, worth flagging on a menu built mostly around meat mains.