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Hungarian Goulash
4 onions
12 small onions
2 pounds veal
1 cup carrot slices
Bacon fat
1 cup turnip slices
1½ pints brown stock
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
1 pint potato balls
Slice the onion and cut the raw veal in cubes. Cook together in a little bacon fat, until brown. Transfer to casserole, pour over it the brown stock and season with pepper and paprika. Add more fat to that in the frying-pan and brown in this the potato balls, small onions, and slices of carrot and turnip. Add the vegetables and salt to the casserole when the meat is partly cooked. Finish the cooking, adding more stock if necessary. This dish should cook two hours. If the broth is too thin when ready to serve, thicken slightly with browned flour rubbed smooth in water.
A stew rather than a true Hungarian gulyás, written for the covered earthenware pot that gave this chapter its name. The quantities are workable, but the seasoning and oven heat are left entirely to the cook.
- "Casserole" means the pot"Casserole" here means the pot -- around 1900 the word usually denotes a lidded earthenware or enameled vessel rather than the baked dish the word later came to mean. A heavy Dutch oven with a tight lid is the nearest equivalent. The recipe gives no cooking location or heat at all; a low burner or a moderate oven (about 325F) will both serve.
- Brown stock1½ pints is 3 cups. Brown stock is beef or veal bones roasted before simmering; a good low-sodium beef stock stands in. Keep another cup warm for topping up, as the recipe expects evaporation.
- Paprika is the whole pointNo quantity is given, which is the recipe's weakest moment. Use 2 tablespoons of sweet Hungarian paprika and stir it into the fat off the heat before the stock goes in — paprika scorches and turns bitter in seconds over direct flame.
- Two kinds of onionThe 4 onions are sliced and browned with the meat, where they dissolve into the sauce. The 12 small onions are pearl or boiling onions, browned separately and added later so they stay whole.
- Potato ballsA pint of potato balls means potatoes cut with a melon baller, roughly 2 lb of potatoes before trimming. Plain 1-inch cubes behave identically and waste nothing.
- TimingTwo hours at a bare simmer, or a moderate oven (about 325F); the recipe specifies neither. It says to add the vegetables 'when the meat is partly cooked', which puts them in at roughly the one-hour mark — potatoes and turnip given the full two hours will collapse into the broth.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until tan, then slurried with cold water. It thickens less per spoonful than raw flour, so allow about 2 tablespoons to 3 cups of liquid, and simmer a few minutes to lose the pastiness.
- YieldServes six generously. It reheats better than it eats the first day.
Goulash appears in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century, by way of Hungarian immigration and an interest in Central European cooking, and it arrived considerably altered. The Hungarian gulyás is a herdsman's dish of beef, onion and paprika, thickened by little more than its own onions; this version substitutes veal, adds carrot, turnip and potato in the manner of an English or American stew, and finishes with browned flour — a thickening that gulyás proper does without, though flour-based rántás is common enough elsewhere in Hungarian cooking. Its placement in a chapter on casserole cookery reflects the period marketing of the covered earthenware pot to American households as a vessel that could go from oven to table.