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Hungarian Goulash
1 lb. lean veal ½ lb. lean beef 3 tablespoonfuls lard I large onion 1½ pints (3 cups) boiling water 1 teaspoonful paprika 12 potato balls 6 small white onions 6 carrot balls 6 turnip balls 1 teaspoonful salt I bay leaf 1 clove 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) flour 1/2 pint (I cup) cold water I chopped chilli pepper Slice the onion and brown it in the lard. Remove the onion and put in the veal and beef cut into small pieces. Brown these thoroughly, and remove the meat and place it in a casserole. Add the paprika and the boiling water. Cover the dish and place it in the oven.
Fry the potato, carrot, turnip balls, and onion in smoking hot fat. Add them to the meat after it has simmered for one and a half hours. After the vegetables are added, add the salt, bay leaf, clove, and
The text breaks off mid-sentence, but the ending is easily reconstructed: the flour is worked into the cold water and stirred in to thicken the gravy, along with the chopped chilli. The rest of the method is complete.
- The typography of the originalThe book's typesetting sometimes renders the numeral 1 as a capital I, which is why the ingredient list reads "I large onion," "I bay leaf," and "I chopped chilli pepper." The parenthetical cup measures are a useful check on the liquids: 3 cups boiling water for the meat, 1 cup cold water for the thickening.
- What "casserole" means hereA casserole in this period is a lidded earthenware or fireproof china pot, browned in on the stove or filled from a separate frying pan and then set in the oven. A modern Dutch oven does the same job and lets you brown the meat in the same vessel, saving a transfer.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A stew of this kind wants a slow oven, 300–325F, held at a bare simmer; a hard boil will make the veal stringy long before the beef is tender.
- TimingNinety minutes before the vegetables go in is right for chuck or shin, but check it — the veal will be done sooner than the beef. After the vegetables are added, another 25–35 minutes is usually enough; they are already part-cooked from the frying.
- The vegetable ballsPotato, carrot and turnip "balls" are cut with a Parisienne scoop (melon baller) from peeled vegetables; the trimmings could be kept for stock. If you have no scoop, cut even 3/4-inch dice; the point is uniform pieces that hold shape in the gravy.
- Frying the vegetables"Smoking hot fat" means fat at its limit, which for lard is around 375F. This is a browning step, not a cooking one — a minute or two for colour, then drain, or the balls disintegrate in the pot.
- Paprika and chilliUse sweet Hungarian paprika, and stir it into the hot fat and meat off the direct heat before the water goes in; paprika scorches and turns bitter easily. The single chopped chilli is the heat, so choose one to suit your table.
- ThickeningWhisk the 2 oz flour into the cup of cold water until smooth before it touches the pot, then stir it in and let the gravy cook 5 minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Two ounces of flour across the whole potful gives a thick, coating gravy; use less for something closer to modern stew consistency.
- YieldTwo and a half pounds of meat with twelve potato balls and six each of the onions, carrot and turnip balls would serve about six, with buttered noodles or bread; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Gulyás takes its name from the Hungarian word for a herdsman — gulya is a herd of cattle — and began as a cauldron dish cooked over open fire on the plains, thickened by nothing but reduced onion and softened by paprika, which is generally said to have reached Hungary via the Ottoman trade and to have been in common peasant use by the early nineteenth century. What appears here is the anglicised drawing-room version that spread through American and British cookbooks in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: veal alongside beef, flour-thickened gravy, and neat scooped vegetable balls that owe more to French garnishing practice than to any shepherd's kettle. A purist would object that a true gulyás is thickened only by its own onion and is soupier than this, and that the addition of flour and clove pushes it toward an ordinary brown stew. Its inclusion here reflects the vogue, strong in the years around the First World War, for fireproof earthenware — one pot that went from oven to table, saving both fuel and washing-up in households with fewer servants than before.