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Goulash (Large or small stalks celery)
1 pkg. Elbow Spaghetti. 1 large can tomatoes. 1 1/2 lbs. onions. 1 large or 2 small stalks celery 1½ lbs. Round steak, ground once.
Cut celery into tomatoes, add salt and 1 T or more of sugar. Let this simmer slowly; cook spaghetti and add. Fry onions and meat separately and add.
Laura Mae Grummitt.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe: the contributor assumed the reader already knew roughly what went in the pot, so several quantities are missing. Here is what has to be filled in before you start.
- The missing tomatoesTomatoes are called for in the method but never listed. A 28-oz can of whole or crushed tomatoes, with juice, suits 1½ lb of beef and produces a loose sauce; two cans if you want it soupier. Nothing in the original settles it.
- "Stalks" means bunches"Stalks" probably means bunches -- In older American usage a "stalk" of celery often meant the whole head rather than a single rib, and "1 large or 2 small" reads that way here, though usage varied and the recipe does not settle it. On that reading one large or two small heads, trimmed and sliced, makes celery a major component rather than a background note.
- Round steak, ground onceA single coarse grind, which butchers will still do on request. Commercial ground beef is generally ground finer, giving a pastier texture. A coarse-ground sirloin is the closest easy substitute; chuck will work but is fattier than round.
- Spaghetti quantityUnstated. Eight ounces dry, broken into two- or three-inch lengths, is about right for this much sauce. Boil it in salted water and drain it before adding; the sauce is not wet enough to cook it from raw.
- OnionsAlso unquantified. Two medium yellow onions, sliced or chopped, fried until well browned before they meet the sauce.
- The sugarA tablespoon "or more" is doing real work, presumably against the acidity of the canned tomatoes then to hand. If your tomatoes taste sweet already, start with less than the full tablespoon and taste before adding more.
- Cooking order and timeCelery and tomatoes simmer first, as the recipe directs, until the celery is tender and the sauce has thickened -- roughly half an hour. Brown the beef and onions in a separate pan, as instructed, and add them towards the end so the meat does not stew.
- YieldNot stated; the quantities would probably serve about six as a luncheon dish or four as a supper. Like most such sauces it will thicken on standing and can be loosened with a little water or tomato juice.
American "goulash" of this kind shares little but the name with Hungarian gulyás, the paprika-heavy herdsman's stew; the word came to mean almost any skillet of ground beef, tomatoes and pasta. That drift is usually associated with Central European immigration in the later nineteenth century, after which the name attached itself to whatever a family already cooked. The tell here is the absence of paprika and the presence of a tablespoon of sugar and a great deal of celery — thrifty, mild, and built to stretch a pound and a half of beef across a table. Community cookbooks were commonly compiled from contributors' own recipe cards and printed with little editing, which would explain why the tomatoes appear in the method but never in the ingredient list: the people who wanted the recipe had already eaten the dish.