Czech

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Utopenci (Pickled Sausages Stuffed with Onion)

The Czech pub snack eaten cold with beer: smoked špekáček sausages, peeled and slit lengthwise, stuffed with onion and left in a boiled-and-cooled brine of vinegar, water, salt, sugar, pepper and allspice for a week, better two, somewhere cold. It is a cooked meat soaked afterwards, but both the brine and the sausage are cold, so the route by which a cooling food drinks its liquid is closed. What is left is the knife and time.

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Vepřo Knedlo Zelo (Roast Pork, Bread Dumplings, and Sauerkraut)

Czechia's national dish, and the name is the ingredient list: pork, dumpling, cabbage. A knedlík is a yeast-raised bread dough cooked in water, so it has no crust and a wet, elastic crumb. A blade would crush it to paste, so it is cut with thread, and cubes of stale roll folded into the dough hold it open.

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Svíčková na smetaně (Beef in Cream Sauce)

One of the best-known Czech dishes: a whole cut of beef braised two hours with root vegetables, the braise itself blended into a velvety sauce and finished with cream. The cranberry jam and whipped cream on top aren't decoration — that sweet-sour contrast is the point, and bread dumplings mop up the rest.