Upper Palatinate Sour Beef with Dotsch Potato Cake

With a long o, so 'Dootsch', as in the German 'Dose'. The Bavarian Academy of Sciences explains the form as vowel lengthening in a monosyllable: the verb is 'datschn' (to press together), the noun 'Dootsch'.

Because it then turns tough and hard. Slow Food quotes the grandmother of the Upper Palatinate author verbatim: 'And on no account should you put an egg into the grated potatoes.' Without egg and flour, only with cream, the Dotsch stays light. The Bavarian Cookbook lists both variants, with sour cream or with eggs.

'Dotschala' are the small potato pancakes fried on the hob. If you layer them in a pan, pour a milk-and-egg mixture over them and bake until the liquid sets, the dish is called 'Hansgirgl', literally Hansgeorg.

Usually something sweet: a plain flour pudding without further flavourings, apple compote or preserved lingonberries. Only after the winter pig slaughter was a piece of Presssack sometimes added. 'Sauers' as a warm meat partner is the inn version served in the northern Upper Palatinate today.

Both. An Upper Palatinate home version states explicitly that Dotsch works as a side for sweet and savoury dishes alike. Sweet, it arrives with apple sauce or sour cream; savoury, merely salted or with boiled pork and sauerkraut. With Sauers it takes the role that potato or bread dumplings play elsewhere: it soaks up the sauce.

Yes, in three tiers: in the Upper Palatinate it is Dotsch, in Upper and Lower Bavaria Reiberdatschi, outside Bavaria Reibekuchen or Kartoffelpuffer. Slow Food Germany accordingly defines Dotsch as the Upper Palatinate way of preparing potatoes known in standard German as Kartoffelpuffer. The name says nothing about size, though: the Upper Palatinate Dotsch often comes whole from a baking tray.