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Porkol, Bucharest
Cut one and a half pounds each raw, lean pork and raw beef into one-inch square pieces. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a braising pan, add the articles, season with a good teaspoon salt, a light teaspoon paprika and cook for twenty minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add two tablespoons flour, briskly shuffle the pan while cooking for two minutes, pour in one and a half pints cold milk, two gills cream, and mix well until it comes to a boil. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, a bean garlic, branch chervil, sprig thyme, bay leaf, add to pan, place lid on and set in oven for one hour. With a Parisian potato scoop remove all you can from three peeled, raw, medium potatoes and add to stew, then reset in oven for another hour, being careful to mix once in a while. Remove, lift up pork, beef and potatoes with a skimmer, dress on a dish, strain sauce through a Chinese strainer over meat, etc., and serve.
A milk-braised paprika stew that owes more to a French kitchen than to any Hungarian one. The dairy is the part that needs watching.
- The hinge: keep the milk from breakingThree cups of milk and a cup of cream held for two hours in the oven will curdle or scorch if the heat is too high. Bring it to the boil gently on the stove, then hold the covered pan at no more than 325F and stir when you check it, as the recipe says.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A lidded braise of this kind belongs at 300-325F; the surface of the liquid should barely tremble when you lift the lid.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. A pint and a half of milk is three cups. Total liquid is a quart, which is generous for three pounds of meat and thins to a sauce as the flour works.
- A bean of garlicOne clove. Tie it with the herbs in the bouquet so it comes out whole rather than dissolving into the sauce.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. Cut the balls from three peeled potatoes; the trimmings are waste in the original, though they will thicken the sauce if you drop them in and strain them out later.
- Potato timingAn hour in the oven will leave small potato balls collapsed. Add them for the last 30-35 minutes if you want them to arrive at the table intact.
- PaprikaUse sweet Hungarian paprika, not smoked or hot. Stirred into hot butter it scorches quickly and turns bitter, so add it with the salt as the meat goes in and keep the pan moving.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the same job; press the herbs lightly rather than forcing the solids through.
- YieldThree pounds of meat plus potatoes serves six to eight. Egg noodles or plain boiled potatoes take the sauce well.
The name is pörkölt, from the Hungarian pörkölni, to singe or scorch, describing the initial searing of the meat rather than any finished texture; it is the drier, onion-and-paprika braise that sits between gulyás and paprikás in the Hungarian repertoire. Why a Hungarian dish carries a Bucharest heading here is unclear, but the version given has been thoroughly filtered through a professional French kitchen: no onion at all, a flour roux, a bouquet garni of parsley, chervil, thyme and bay, milk and cream in place of stock, and potatoes cut with a Parisian scoop. Paprika reached Hungary along Ottoman trade routes. What survives of the original is the pork-and-beef mixture, the paprika, and the long covered braise.