Traditional German recipe involving boiled and fried bread, with seasoned Tuna and Lemon Juice?

Question

I'm not sure if dish identification is on-topic with this site, so feel free to correct me if it isn't.

I have some older German-descended family members who make a traditional dish I would like to find more information on. The dish itself is pretty basic. A simple egg/flour-based bread dough is flattened, sliced into triangular or freeform pieces, shortly boiled in water, and then fried in oil. The bread can sometimes be salted or contain other seasoning. The bread is served with minced and fried Tuna patties or other Tuna dishes, and is eaten with the fish, often with lemon juice sprinkled onto the bread and fish. Its a dry and savory/sour dish, meant to be shared by a group. Ive also been told it was a dish made during impoverished times.

My family members say this dish is called (a word I don't know the spelling of, neither do they) something that sounds like Nymph or Nypp / Nyff (closest German word I can find is Kniff). Its a recipe that has been passed orally through a couple family lines so the actual word may be lost. For the life of me I cannot find information about this dish anywhere on the internet. Ive described the dish, searched dishes made by the locals, searched for dishes prepared in a similar manner, but I can't find anything that matches the description of it.

I was curious if any well-known traditional dishes matched or were similar to this.

Answer 1

I am not aware of any traditional dish like this in Germany. Especially the soaking in water and then frying seems very unfamiliar. For (deep) frying you want your ingredients to be as dry as possible.

As for the name I have no clue, there is „Knifte“ for a slice of bread but no dish I know reminds me of Nymphe.

From the name and the general preparation, I would guess that the dish might be based on a recipe with a more Eastern European or perhaps Jewish cuisine background.

Answer 2

Alternative interpretation, that fits the dish type and name if not the German origin: it could be a type of Kofta.

In Eurasian cuisine, basically any fried patty is considered a kofta. The prototypical version, also called "meatball" in American English, usually consists of minced meat mixed with soaked bread and bound with egg, heavily spiced. But there are all kinds of variations, including ones made with fish. So, if you showed the dish to anybody from that culinary tradition, it would be recognizable as a kofta, and upon hearing the recipe, doubly so.

Then there is the name. Wikipedia says that the Anglicized name "Kofta" is an Urdu loanword. But in Turkey, where different types of this dish are very popular, the name is written "Köfta", which on the Balkans has mutated to "Kyufta" or "Kyffte", which in German pronunciation is not very far from your supposed Nyff.

The country of origin doesn't fit the name. A modern German would call (the typical) kofta one of several unrelated names: "Fleischklops", "Frikadelle", "Boulete" or "Fleischpflanzerl", with Wikipedia suggesting some more variants, and yours is even more likely to be descriptively called something like "Fischklops". But there is no guarantee that a dish that is popular in your immigrant family stems from their own country of origin. There has always been a lot of cultural exchange throughout Europe over the centuries. So there is a good chance that some great-...-grandma of yours learned the dish from, say, a Turkish person she knew, or even that she was Turkish/Eastern European/Western Asian herself, and that the recipe stayed in the family, with a name that got corrupted over the generations.

Answer 3

Another partial match is Knipp. The name and back-story match well — it’s a traditional German poverty food, and I think would be pronounced as Knipf in some dialects — but the dish itself doesn’t match OP’s family’s version very closely: it’s a cheap sausage, consisting of some meat (usually cheap pork parts, from a brief reading around) bulked out with grains (usually oats), typically cut into wide round slices and fried. Conceivably, the tuna patties part of OP’s dish could be a descendent of this, with the tuna having gotten substituted for pork parts as a more cheaply available meat at some stage after the family emigrated?