Salzburger Nockerln

The Salzburger Nockerln are a sweet soufflé. Stiffly beaten egg whites with sugar are combined with yolks, vanilla and a little flour, and the batter is placed in a shallow buttered dish, usually with a little cream in the bottom. Using a spatula, three tall mounds are formed and baked in a hot oven for a few minutes until golden on the outside and still creamy inside. Dusting them with sugar evokes the snowy mountains around Salzburg.

The Austrian Ministry of Agriculture's register of traditional foods includes a 1719 recipe from Conrad Hagger’s cookbook, published in Salzburg, although it used a different batter. Recipes closer to the modern version appear in the 19th century. The same source relates a legend connecting the dessert to Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau and Salome Alt at the turn of the 16th to 17th century, but considers it doubtful: the kind of oven required only existed much later.

The dessert is so associated with the city that it appeared in a 1938 operetta set in Salzburg, with a song about it. The register calls it the “queen of soufflés.”

Because it is a soufflé, don’t wait: it begins to deflate a few minutes after coming out of the oven. That’s why it’s made to order.