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Goulash, Hongroise
Cut two pounds of the rump part of beef into one-inch squares. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a saucepan, add the beef; season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons paprika; stir well with a wooden spoon. Finely slice one small carrot and two small, sound onions; when the meat is a light brown add the vegetables, stir well and cook for two minutes. Add one tablespoon flour, stir well again, then add two gills hot water, one gill claret, one gill tomato sauce. Tie in a small piece of clean cloth twelve allspice, one bay leaf, two cloves and one saltspoon thyme and place in the pan. Peel two medium, raw potatoes, cut them into three-quarters of an inch squares and also add to the pan. Cover the pan and let slowly cook for thirty minutes. Add now one tablespoon finely chopped parsley and one bean very finely chopped garlic. Cover the pan and cook again for twenty minutes. Remove the cloth with the ingredients. Pour the goulash into a hot dish and serve.
A French-hotel reading of Hungarian gulyás, written for a cook who measured in gills and saltspoons. The conversions are simple; the timing is the part that needs rethinking.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills hot water is 1 cup, and the claret and tomato sauce are half a cup each. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the paprika half a teaspoon and the thyme a scant quarter teaspoon.
- "One bean" of garlicThat is one clove, not a head. The odd phrasing probably reflects a translator working from French gousse d'ail, though the wording is not documented.
- The cooking time is too shortThe cooking time is short -- Fifty minutes is unlikely to tenderise two pounds of cubed rump; the collagen generally wants an hour and a half or more at a bare simmer. Cook the meat and aromatics low and covered until a cube crushes easily against the pan, then proceed.
- Add the potatoes latePotatoes cut in three-quarter-inch dice disintegrate over a long braise. Hold them back and give them the last 25 to 30 minutes; the original's timing only works because the whole dish is undercooked.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon is very restrained by Hungarian standards, and this is the ingredient the dish is named for. Use sweet Hungarian paprika, a tablespoon or more, and stir it in off direct heat or into the liquid — paprika scorches and turns bitter fast in hot fat.
- Claret and tomato sauceClaret means a dry red Bordeaux or any dry red. "Tomato sauce" here is the period's cooked, roux-thickened tomato sauce, not a pasta sauce or ketchup; passata or thin tomato purée is the closest stand-in.
- Lard and the spice bagTwo tablespoons lard browns the meat properly; butter burns, oil works but tastes flatter. The cloth bundle of allspice, bay, cloves and thyme is a spice sachet rather than a true bouquet garni -- a tea ball or muslin square does the same job, and it must come out before serving, as the recipe directs.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef with potatoes feeds four generously. Nothing here needs an oven, but a heavy Dutch oven holds the low heat better than a thin saucepan.
Gulyás began as herdsmen's food — the word means "herdsman" in Hungarian, and the dish is named for the men rather than the meat — cooked in a kettle over an open fire with beef, onions and paprika, and often little else. Paprika itself is generally held to have reached Hungary by way of the Ottoman lands, and was a peasant seasoning long before it became the national one; Hungarian cooks are usually described as using it far more freely than their Western European contemporaries. What appears here is the dish after it passed through the professional French kitchen: the browning, the flour, the wine, the tomato sauce and the tied spice bag are all hotel technique, and the paprika has been trimmed to a level a Continental dining room would accept. Books of this kind collected national dishes for American households, and the recipes are frequently less a record of how a dish was eaten at home than of how it was served under a foreign name in a good restaurant.