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Goulache
This is an excellent Hungarian dish, which is variously spelled goulache, goulash, guillash, gullasch, or gulias-hus. Remove the skins and fat from one pound of lean sirloin or rib of beef, and cut it into small dice. Wash and peel two small potatoes, and cut them also into dice, together with four ounces of bacon. Tie a tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds in a stewpan; when hot, add half an onion finely chopped, and fry just long enough to slightly colour. Add the pieces of beef, season with salt and pepper, and let them cook over a bright fire for about ten minutes. Sprinkle in a dessert-spoonful of flour, moisten with half a wine-glassful of Madeira, and a gill of stock, add the tied-up caraway-seeds, and let all simmer slowly. Melt four ounces of butter in a frying-pan, add the bacon, and fry a little. Now add the potatoes, and cook them slowly over the fire until of a nice golden colour; pour off the superfluous fat, mix with the meat, cover over and allow to simmer gently until the meat and potatoes are quite done. Stir from time to time, being careful not to break the potato dice, remove the caraway-seeds, dish-up on a hot dish, and serve very hot. Coarsely minced apples are some-times added and cooked with the meat. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A late-Victorian English reading of Hungarian gulyás, written before paprika was standard in British kitchens. The text has a printer's slip that needs sorting out before you start.
- The missing line"Tie a tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds in a stewpan" is garbled. Caraway should be tied in a scrap of muslin; the stewpan wants fat (butter or lard) heated in it first, then the onion. Read it as two separate instructions that have collapsed into one.
- Gill and wine-glassAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. Half a wine-glassful is about 1 fl oz of Madeira. Both are small: this is a tight, glossy braise rather than a soupy stew, and it will need topping up with stock if the pan runs dry.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo level teaspoons of flour, no more. It is there to bind the small amount of liquid, not to thicken a sauce.
- No paprikaGenuine gulyás is built on sweet paprika, and its absence here is the most conspicuous difference from the dish as it is cooked in Hungary. A tablespoon of sweet paprika stirred in off the heat after the onion, before any liquid goes in, brings it much closer; scorched paprika turns bitter, so keep the pan off the flame while it goes in.
- The cutSirloin or rib diced small will be done in 20-30 minutes and does not repay long simmering. If you want the hour-plus braise the method implies, use chuck or shin and give it 90 minutes before the potatoes go anywhere near it.
- Four ounces of butterThat is a quarter pound to fry two small potatoes and four ounces of bacon. The bacon fat alone will nearly do it; an ounce of butter or lard is plenty, and the instruction to pour off the surplus tells you the original author knew it.
- Potatoes cooked apartFrying the dice separately and folding them in at the end is the point of the method: they stay in distinct golden cubes instead of dissolving into the gravy. Stir gently, as directed, and only when necessary.
- YieldOne pound of beef with two small potatoes serves two generously, or three with bread and a salad.
The name comes from the Hungarian gulyás, a herdsman who tended cattle on the Great Plain; gulyáshús is simply herdsman's meat, a pot of beef cooked over an open fire. The dish rose from that plain fare to national emblem in the nineteenth century, when Hungarian writers and cooks promoted it as a symbol of Magyar identity against Habsburg and Viennese culinary influence, and it travelled into western European kitchens in the decades that followed. Cassell's string of spellings -- goulache, goulash, guillash, gullasch, gulias-hus -- is a fair record of a word still finding its footing in English, and the French-inflected "goulache" suggests the dish may have reached British kitchens by way of professional kitchen French rather than directly from Budapest. Caraway is used in Hungarian practice; the absence of paprika, and the tidy dice of potato browned in butter, are consistent with the recipe having passed through that same French filter on its way to the page.