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Goulash of Veal
1 1/2 pounds lean veal, 1 pound partly cooked new potatoes, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 small onion, 1/2 pint cream, paprika, pepper, and salt. Free meat from skin and sinews and cut it into dice. Cut potatoes into cubes. Melt Crisco in saucepan, add meat and fry lightly for several minutes, add onion, finely chopped, stir over fire for about 5 minutes, season with salt and pepper to taste and add potatoes. Pour off superfluous fat, mix carefully and moisten with cream and 1 tablespoon rich white stock, season with a sufficiency of paprika pepper to give sauce a pink tint, and cook gently for 20 minutes. It is best to cook the Goulash at latter stage in a fireproof earthenware stewpan, in which it should be sent to table. Great care must be taken so as not to break potatoes while cooking. Serve very hot.
A Crisco-era company recipe, and closer to a paprika cream stew than to a Hungarian goulash. The hinge is heat control at the end: the cream must never come to a boil or it will break and the potatoes will fall apart.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco was new when this book was published, and the book itself is a Procter & Gamble promotion, which is why the fat is named as a brand. Any neutral fat works; butter or lard gives more flavour, and 3-4 tablespoons is ample for a wide pan.
- 1/2 pint of creamA US half pint is 1 cup. Use heavy cream rather than light, since it holds together better over 20 minutes of gentle cooking; single cream or half-and-half is much more likely to curdle if the pan is allowed to simmer.
- The tablespoon of stockOne tablespoon of white stock in a dish holding a cup of cream is essentially a seasoning, not a liquid. If the pan looks dry as the veal cooks, add stock a spoonful at a time rather than more cream.
- Veal cut and timingTwenty minutes will only tenderise a tender cut. Dice loin or leg small, about 3/4 inch; shoulder or shank wants an hour or more and would need extra liquid, which changes the dish.
- "Partly cooked new potatoes"Boil small waxy potatoes until a knife just meets resistance, then cool before cubing. Fully cooked potatoes disintegrate during the final 20 minutes, which is what the warning about breaking them is about.
- PaprikaThe instruction is to add enough to tint the sauce pink, which with modern sweet Hungarian paprika is roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons. Stir it in off the direct heat; paprika scorches quickly in hot fat and turns bitter.
- Fireproof earthenwareThe period stewpan was flameproof clay meant to go from fire to table. A modern enamelled cast-iron or heavy stainless pan does the same job, but keep the burner low and use a diffuser if the pan is thin.
- YieldServes four as written, with bread or buttered noodles. It reheats poorly, as the cream separates on a second boiling.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911; that is why a veal stew calls for a branded fat by name rather than simply butter or lard. The dish itself shows how far the word goulash had drifted from the Hungarian gulyás, a beef and onion stew of the herdsmen whose name it carries. American and British cookery of the period attached the word to almost any paprika-seasoned meat in sauce, and the cream and new potatoes here owe more to Austrian and Viennese cooking, by a route that can only be guessed at, than to anything cooked on the Hungarian plain. The insistence that the stewpan be sent to the table is a small period detail worth noting: fireproof earthenware for serving was fashionable in the 1910s.