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Goulash of Venison with Dumplings
Cut two pounds raw venison from a leg into pieces one and a half inches square. Heat one tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add the venison; season with a saltspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Stir well with a wooden spoon and briskly cook for ten minutes, or until a good golden colour; then add one tablespoon flour, a sliced carrot and a sliced onion. Stir well again; moisten with a gill claret, half pint broth or hot water, half gill tomato sauce and one gill demi-glace, adding a sprig bay leaf and a saltspoon thyme. Stir with the spoon and let boil for five minutes; then add two medium, raw potatoes, peeled and cut into pieces three-quarters of an inch square. Cover the pan and slowly cook for ten minutes. Place the pan in a hot oven and cook again for forty minutes. Remove from the oven, take up the bay leaf, skim the fat from the surface. Pour the goulash into a hot dish and serve with six dumplings placed over. While the goulash is in the oven prepare the dumplings.
A small braise in the French manner wearing a Hungarian name. The measurements are pre-metric restaurant shorthand, and the one thing the recipe assumes you already have on hand is demi-glace.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so a gill of claret is 4 fl oz and half a gill of tomato sauce is 2 fl oz. Half a pint of broth is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Demi-glaceOne gill (half a cup) of reduced brown sauce is what gives this its body and gloss. Frozen or jarred demi-glace concentrate works; half a cup of strong reduced beef or game stock is the honest substitute, though the sauce will be thinner.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" in books of this period is roughly 400-450F; the book gives no figure. For a covered braise that is aggressive by modern habit -- check at 30 minutes and drop to 325-350F if the liquid is boiling hard rather than barely bubbling.
- The cut matters more than the clockVenison leg is very lean and does not have the collagen that rewards long cooking. Fifty-five minutes of total simmering will either be right or will take the meat past tender into dry, with little middle ground. Shoulder or neck, cut the same size, is far more forgiving and can go an hour longer.
- ClaretAny dry red Bordeaux-style wine. Add it before the broth and let it reduce a minute or two so the sauce does not taste sharp.
- The potatoesThree-quarter-inch cubes going in for a full fifty minutes will be soft to the point of dissolving, which partly thickens the sauce. If you want them intact, add them for the last 20 minutes in the oven.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of sweet paprika, added to the meat in hot butter, scorches quickly and turns bitter. Keep the pan moving; note that the recipe browns the seasoned meat for a full ten minutes before any liquid goes in.
- Dumplings and yieldThe dumplings are a separate recipe elsewhere in the book; any plain flour-and-egg dumpling or spaetzle poached in salted water suits. Two pounds of meat with potatoes serves four.
Goulash is the Hungarian gulyás, from gulyás hús, herdsman's meat -- a cattle-drovers' dish of beef, onion and paprika that became a national emblem in the nineteenth century and then spread through the hotel kitchens of the Austro-Hungarian empire. What is on this page is that dish translated into French professional technique: the meat is sealed and floured, then moistened with claret, tomato and demi-glace rather than built on onions and paprika alone, and it finishes in the oven like any ragout. That hybrid is characteristic of the grand-hotel cooking these international cook books recorded, where a dish from "the world's kitchen" was reproduced with whatever the sauce station already had simmering. The venison is a further step from the original, and the potatoes are cooked in the sauce.