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Hungarian Goulash
Slice a couple of onions and cook until brown in a little bacon fat. Remove the onion and put into the frying-pan a pound of raw veal, cut in inch cubes. When the meat has become a little browned remove it from the fat, transfer to casserole and pour over it three-fourths of a pint of brown sauce, seasoning with pepper and paprika. Add more fat to that in the frying-pan and brown in this potato balls, small onions, and slices of carrot and turnip. Add these vegetables
A short, workable braise, though the text breaks off mid-sentence just as the vegetables go into the pot. The finish is obvious: add them to the casserole with the meat and cook, covered, until everything is tender.
- What "casserole" means hereIn household cookery of this period the word usually meant the vessel: a covered earthenware or enameled pot that went into the oven, though it was already being applied to the dishes cooked in it. A modern Dutch oven is the near equivalent, and you can brown in it and skip the separate frying-pan entirely.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 325-350F, covered, for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours should bring cubed veal shoulder to tenderness. Note that the recipe as printed browns the root vegetables and adds them along with the meat; if you would rather they kept their shape, hold them back for the last 40 minutes.
- Three-fourths of a pintThat is 1 1/2 cups. It is barely enough to cover a pound of meat, which is intentional in a covered pot; check once during cooking and top up with stock if it reduces too far.
- Brown sauceThe book assumes a brown sauce of the espagnole type made up in the household. Substitute 1 1/2 cups of good beef stock thickened with a brown roux of butter and flour, or use unthickened stock and finish with a flour-and-water slurry.
- The paprika is the dishUse a generous tablespoon of sweet Hungarian paprika rather than a pinch, and stir it into the meat and sauce off the direct heat. Paprika scorches easily at frying temperature and quickly turns bitter.
- Cut of vealAsk for shoulder or breast, both collagen-rich and suited to two hours of moist heat. Veal leg or cutlet, cubed, will go dry and stringy in the same time.
- Potato ballsThese are cut with a large melon baller or Parisienne scoop, or simply trimmed from peeled potatoes. Use a waxy variety; a floury baking potato disintegrates into the sauce.
- YieldA pound of meat plus vegetables serves three to four. Many cooks find it better on the second day, once the paprika has bled into the sauce.
Goulash takes its name from the Hungarian gulyas, meaning herdsman or cattle-drover, and the dish is generally traced to the open-fire cooking of the Hungarian plains, where it was a beef stew rather than veal. Paprika, a New World pepper that reached Hungary by way of the Ottoman Balkans, became its defining seasoning in the nineteenth century, and the pepper-red stew was carried into English-speaking kitchens largely through Austro-Hungarian restaurant cooking and central European immigration. What is printed here is a thoroughly domesticated American version: the meat is veal and the sauce is a French brown sauce rather than the onion-and-paprika juices of a true gulyas or porkolt -- the kind of adaptation that goes with the period's enthusiasm for covered earthenware pots, recommended to housekeepers as economical because they turned cheap cuts and a slow oven into something that could be carried to the table in its own dish.