Erdäpfelkäs (Kartoffelkäse)

Erdäpfelkäs belongs to Niederbayern, Lower Bavaria, and to the Brotzeit table, the cold bread-and-snack board you put down when nobody needs a show and everyone needs feeding. No cheese is hiding in it. It gets the name because the mashed potato and sour cream spread like a soft fresh cheese, which is a good enough joke for the south.

This is larder cooking. A few stored floury potatoes, an onion, sour cream, caraway, chives if the pot on the windowsill is alive. In Lower Bavaria and the Innviertel across the Austrian line, they say Erdäpfelkäs; elsewhere in Bavaria you hear Kartoffelkäse. Some cooks make it loose with cream, some sharper with quark, some nearly plain with only onion and caraway. Im Norden anders, im Süden anders. The north has its fish and rye; the south has this on rye bread with radishes and a beer beside it.

The whole dish turns on the potato. Boil floury potatoes in their skins, peel them hot, rice them hot, then let the steam leave before the sour cream goes in. Hot potato rices dry and fine; if you mash cold potato it goes lumpy, and if you beat it with dairy while it is steaming, the starch smears and the spread turns gluey. No blender. This is a fork dish, not a construction project.

Salt the onion lightly before it goes in. That pulls off the raw edge and draws out enough juice to season the potato instead of biting through it. Fold, taste, chill a little, and bring it back just cool before serving. Schön ist, was schmeckt.