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Chicken Paprika
Mrs. Geo. Wright.
Dress, clean and cut two chickens into pieces for serving; then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook four and one-half tablespoons butter with one-half onion finely chopped, fifteen minutes, stirring almost constantly to prevent burning. Add chicken, sprinkle with four and one-half tablespoons flour, mixed and sifted with one teaspoon paprika, and pour over one and one-half cups chicken stock. Bring to the boiling point and let simmer twenty minutes, adding more chicken stock if necessary. Remove to casserole dish, cover, and cook until chicken is tender. 3 C cold cooked chicken 2 T gelatine 1/2 C cold water 1 can mushrooms Gyda Finstad.
A straightforward braise that reads oddly because a second contributor's ingredient list has been set immediately after it with no method attached. Read the Wright recipe as ending at "cook until chicken is tender."
- The orphaned listThe final line — 3 cups cold cooked chicken, 2 tablespoons gelatine, half a cup cold water, a can of mushrooms, credited to Gyda Finstad — appears to be the ingredient list of a separate dish, most likely a jellied or moulded chicken, printed here without its method. How the directions went missing is not recoverable; there is not enough to reconstruct, so ignore it.
- Two chickensMarket birds of this period were generally smaller than modern supermarket chickens, often in the region of 2 to 3 lb dressed, so two of them are roughly equivalent to one modern 4 to 5 lb bird cut into eight or ten pieces. Halve the recipe if you use a single supermarket chicken, or increase the aromatics and stock to match a larger one.
- Fifteen minutes on the onionThat is the hinge. Half an onion in four and a half tablespoons of butter, stirred nearly constantly for a quarter hour over low heat, goes soft and sweet without colouring — this is the whole flavour base, and rushing it leaves the sauce thin and raw-tasting.
- PaprikaUse sweet Hungarian paprika, fresh. Paprika loses its colour and aroma within a year, and a teaspoon of stale supermarket powder will give you neither the red nor the sweetness the dish is named for. Keep the heat moderate once it goes in; scorched paprika turns bitter.
- "Casserole dish"Here it means an ovenproof covered pot — a Dutch oven works. Transfer everything, sauce included. The recipe gives neither temperature nor time, only 'cook until chicken is tender'; a moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F for 30 to 45 minutes, will get you there — test by whether the thigh meat pulls easily from the bone.
- Stock and consistencyFour and a half tablespoons of flour to a cup and a half of stock makes a distinctly thick sauce. Have another cup of stock warm and loosen it as it cooks down, particularly during the oven stage.
- No sour creamHungarian paprikás csirke is finished off the heat with sour cream stirred into the sauce. This version omits it entirely. A half cup stirred in at the end, with the pot off the burner so it does not curdle, brings it closer to the original.
- YieldServes six as written, four generously. Buttered egg noodles suit it, though the recipe suggests no accompaniment.
Paprika reached American kitchens largely through Hungarian immigration in the decades either side of 1900, and by the time this recipe was written down the spice was familiar enough that a dish could name itself after it without explanation. What this version shows is how far the dish had travelled from Budapest: the onion, the paprika and the chicken remain, but the sour cream finish that defines paprik s csirke has been dropped, leaving a flour-thickened stock gravy of the sort found throughout American cookery of the period. Community cookbooks of this kind were assembled from whatever the contributors cooked at home, and a name like Chicken Paprika carried a mild worldliness suitable for a luncheon table without demanding anything unfamiliar of the cook.