Goulash
1 pound top round of beef 1 ounce salt pork 1 cup tomatoes 1 small onion 1 bay leaf 3 whole cloves 1/2 stalk celery 1 blade mace 3 whole peppercorns Flour Salt and paprika Fry the salt pork until a light brown; add the beef, cut into twoinch pieces and sprinkled with flour; cover with water; let simmer for two hours and season with salt and paprika. Then cook the vegetables and spices for twenty minutes in water sufficient to cover them; rub them through a sieve and add to some of the stock in which the meat was cooked. Thicken with flour, using a tablespoonful moistened in cold water to each cup of liquid, and season. Serve the meat on the platter with the sauce poured over it. Potatoes, carrots and green peppers, cooked until tender and cut into small pieces or long narrow strips, are usually put over the top.
A gently Americanized goulash from the early twentieth century — closer to a braise with a sieved tomato sauce than to a Hungarian gulyás. A few things need translating.
- The hinge: paprika goes in late hereUnusually, the paprika is added as seasoning after the two-hour simmer rather than bloomed in fat at the start. That keeps it from scorching, but it also means the finished dish tastes mildly of paprika rather than deeply of it. If you want the classic flavor, use a good sweet Hungarian paprika and be generous — a tablespoon or more, stirred in off the heat.
- Salt porkAn ounce is roughly a single thick slice. Rinse it if it is heavily cured; unsmoked bacon or pancetta is the closest easy substitute, though both bring smoke or seasoning the original did not have.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold whole as flat "blades" or ground. A blade is usually reckoned at somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace, added with the other spices and strained out.
- "1 cup tomatoes"In books of this period this usually means canned tomatoes in their own juice; a cup is roughly the drained contents of a modern 14.5 oz tin. Fresh tomatoes work in season.
- Two-inch pieces, covered with waterTop round is lean and will need the full two hours at a bare simmer, never a boil, or it turns stringy. Keep the liquid barely covering the meat; too much water gives you a thin stock and a weak sauce.
- The two-pot methodVegetables and spices are cooked separately and sieved, then combined with meat stock. A food mill or a fine sieve and a wooden spoon does the work; a blender will emulsify the aromatics rather than strain them, so pass it through a sieve afterward regardless.
- Thickening ratioOne tablespoon flour slaked in cold water per cup of liquid gives a light, gravy-thick sauce. Let it simmer a few minutes after adding or it will taste of raw flour.
- YieldA pound of beef serves three, or four with the potatoes, carrots and peppers piled over the top as directed.
By the time this book was printed, goulash had traveled a long way from the Hungarian herdsmen's kettle that gave it its name — gulyás means simply "herdsman," and the dish was originally a soupy meat stew cooked over an open fire. American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s took up goulash enthusiastically as an exotic-sounding way to use cheap cuts, but they often domesticated it: the paprika became a pinch of seasoning, tomatoes and a bay-leaf-and-clove spice bundle crept in, and the whole thing was finished with a flour-thickened sauce poured over the meat on a platter, in the manner of a roast. The strips of potato, carrot and green pepper laid over the top are pure period plating. What survives of the original is the essential logic: tough beef, long slow moisture, paprika, and onion.