Beat 3 eggs with 2 tablespoonfuls of water; add a pinch of salt and enough flour to make a stiff dough work well. Then roll out as thin as paper; fold the dough and cut into round pieces; fry in deep hot lard to a golden brown. Serve hot with stewed chicken.
A three-egg noodle dough, rolled paper-thin and deep-fried rather than boiled. The whole dish stands or falls on how thin you get the dough.
- Roll it thinner than feels reasonable"Thin as paper" is not a flourish — thick pieces puff into doughy bread rather than crisp blisters. Roll until you can see the pattern of the work surface through the sheet, resting the dough 30 minutes first so the gluten relaxes and stops springing back.
- How much flourThe original leaves it open, which is honest: egg size varies. Expect roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups (250–320 g) for 3 eggs plus 2 tablespoons water. Add it a half cup at a time and stop when the dough is stiff and no longer tacky.
- "Work well" means kneadThis is a hand-kneaded pasta dough, not a batter. Eight to ten minutes of firm kneading is what makes it possible to roll so thin without tearing.
- The foldFolding the sheet before cutting rounds gives you two or more layers per piece, which separate and blister in the fat. Cut through the folded stack with a 2-inch cutter or a glass rim; do not press the layers together at the edges.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is authentic and gives the cleanest flavour, but any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. Hold it at 350–365F; below that the pieces absorb fat, above it they brown before the interior sets. Fry in small batches and drain on a rack rather than paper so they stay crisp.
- Yield and timingYield depends on how thin you roll and the size of the cutter — expect several dozen small rounds, enough for 4 to 6 as an accompaniment. Each batch takes roughly 1 to 2 minutes, turning once. They are best within the hour and do not reheat well.
- "Stewed chicken"In a Hungarian context this most likely points to a paprika braise finished with sour cream — the fried pieces are there to be dragged through the sauce. Any well-sauced braise serves the same purpose.
Hungarian cooking has a large family of stiff egg doughs that are rolled thin and either boiled, torn into soup, or fried in lard — the boiled versions include the rolled-and-cut *csusza* served with cabbage or cottage cheese, and the fried versions shade into the sweet festival pastries such as *csöröge* and *forgácsfánk*, the latter name referring to wood shavings. The distinction between noodle and fritter is largely one of what happens to the dough at the last moment, which is why a book like this can file a deep-fried pastry under "noodles" without contradiction. The pairing with a stewed chicken suggests *paprikás csirke*, one of the dishes English and American readers most readily associated with Hungary around 1900, when paprika was still an unfamiliar import and a "dish of all nations" collection could rely on Hungary meaning chicken, sour cream and red pepper. Lard, not butter or oil, was the usual Hungarian frying fat of the period, and it remained so well into the twentieth century.