Note: These dumplings are intended to be served with gravy (as opposed to dumplings intended to be served in a soup).

Wash the dirt off the potatoes and boil them until they are cooked (20-30 minutes, just as per nomal boiled potatoes). Do not peel the potatoes before boiling; they need to be cooked in their skin.

Peel the boiled potatoes. The skins come off easier when the potatoes are still hot, but you need to use a fork to hold the potato. Alternatively, if you wait until the potatoes cool, you can hold them in one hand while peeling them with the other, but the skin is a bit harder to remove when the potato is cold.

Use a potato ricer to break up the peeled potatoes. Put the riced potatoes in a large bowl. Add the flour, corn starch, eggs (without the shell), salt, pepper and nutmeg. Mix all the ingredients together with your hands until you have a uniform mixture.

Take a small handfull of the mixture and form it into a ball. Repeat until all the mixture has been formed into balls of approximately the same size. If you wet your hands with cold water, the dough will not stick to your hands and you can form the balls easier.

Heat a large pot of water to boiling point. The pot should be big enough to hold all the dumplings and still have room for the dumplings to move about. Gently add the dumpling balls to the boiling water. The water will stop boiling; wait until it starts to simmer again and then turn down the temperature until the water is just lightly simmering.

For this recipe, I make about 16 dumplings, each about 5cm (2 inches) wide. Once the water is simmering, they take 15-20 minutes to cook. If you make the dumplings smaller then they cook faster and if you make them larger they need more time to cook.

After about 15 minutes, remove one ball and cut it in half. If it looks fluffy in the center, then it is cooked and you can remove all the dumplings. If it looks wet and does not have a fluffy appearance, then discard it and let the others cook for several more minutes before removing them.

Serve the dumplings with gravy.

For this recipe, one needs to use corn starch rather than corn flour. The difference between the two is that corn flour is simply ground up dried corn (typically used to make tortillas and certain other flour products) whereas corn starch is from the endosperm (the white heart) of the corn kernel (typically used as a thickening agent). Corn starch is largely tasteless, unlike corn flour, so using corn flour will give an off taste to the dumplings. In the UK and some commonwealth countries, the term corn flour is othen used to mean corn starch, so a packet of corn starch may well be labeled corn flour.

If the dumplings fall apart while cooking, you've used too little corn starch. If they are hard after cooking, then you've used too much. If you are making the recipe for the first time, you could try cooking just one dumpling first and if it doesn't turn out, adjust the amount of ingredients accordingly.

To make this recipe for 4 people instead of 8, just half the ingredients.

If you have too many dumplings, you can store them in the fridge overnight in a covered bowl. Then simply slice them and fry them in butter to warm them up the next day; if you have some left-over gravy then this makes a good side-dish.