Cut beef into small pieces. Heat some dripping in a saucepan; add the meat, salt and black pepper; cover and let stew half an hour. Then add 3 potatoes cut into dice pieces, 1 onion sliced thin, 1 cup of hot water, and ½ teaspoonful of paprica. Let all cook until tender. Then add some chopped parsley and thicken the sauce with flour, mixed in ½ cup of milk. Let cook a few minutes and serve hot.
A very spare gulyás-style stew, written for cooks who were expected to judge quantities by eye. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Quantities are missingNo weight of beef is given. For 3 potatoes and 1 onion, figure 1½ to 2 lb of chuck or shin, cut in ¾-inch cubes; that serves four.
- DrippingBeef or bacon dripping, the standard household fat of the period. Lard, or a neutral oil with a spoonful of butter, does the same job.
- PapricaPresumably Hungarian paprika, most likely the sweet grade. Half a teaspoon is modest for the amount of meat here — a tablespoon is closer to what the dish is named for. Add it off the heat or into liquid, since paprika turns bitter if scorched in hot fat.
- The half-hour stewChuck or shin will not be tender in thirty minutes plus the time the potatoes need. Give the meat 1 to 1½ hours covered over low heat, adding water as needed, then put the potatoes in for the last 20 minutes so they do not collapse.
- BrowningThe recipe covers the pan immediately, so the meat steams rather than browns. Searing it in batches first, uncovered, costs ten minutes and gives the sauce most of its colour and depth.
- ThickeningFlour stirred into milk and poured in at the end will taste raw and can curdle if the pot is at a hard boil. Whisk it smooth, add it with the pan barely simmering, and cook three to five minutes until the floury edge is gone.
- LiquidOne cup of hot water is enough for a thick, almost dry stew. Beef stock instead of water is a straightforward improvement, and top up if the pan threatens to catch.
Hungarian guly\em>gulyás, the herdsman who cooked it — travelled through Vienna and then into English and American cookbooks in the later nineteenth century, and by the time this daily calendar-cookbook appeared it had become shorthand for "paprika stew." What survives in this version is the paprika and the onion; what has fallen away is the long simmer and the generous hand with the spice, which in Hungary is measured in spoonfuls rather than half-teaspoons. The milk-and-flour thickening is an English-American habit rather than a Hungarian one, where the fat and the onion cooking down do the work. Books of this type sold on novelty: a dish for every day of the year, offering the home cook a tour of the world from a single saucepan.