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Goulasch
(Hungary.) Boil and cut into bits the meat of a calf's head. Fry it with an onion in butter, add salt and paprika, 1 pint of brown stock or sauce, and 12 balls cut from potatoes and fried in butter, also 12 onions cooked in butter till brown. Arrange the meat in centre and the vegetables around.
An Anglicized parlour version of gulyás, closer to a garnished platter than to the paprika stew Hungarians would recognize. The main obstacles are the cut of meat and the absence of any timings at all.
- Calf's headWhole calf's head now generally has to be ordered from a butcher, and takes 2-3 hours of simmering with aromatics before the meat pulls free. Veal cheeks or boneless veal shank, simmered until tender and cut into 3/4-inch pieces, give a similar gelatinous texture with far less work.
- Boil, then fryThe meat is already cooked through by the time it hits the butter, so the frying stage is for colour only: high heat, a few minutes, in batches so the pan does not steam.
- PaprikaUse Hungarian sweet paprika, and add it off the heat or with the stock already going in. Paprika scorches within seconds in hot butter and turns acrid. Start with a tablespoon for this quantity.
- Brown stock or sauce"Brown stock" is unthickened veal or beef stock; "brown sauce" is the same stock thickened with a brown roux, an espagnole. Either works, but a pint of plain stock will need reducing or a small beurre manié to coat the meat rather than pool around it.
- Potato ballsCut with a melon baller from peeled waxy or all-purpose potatoes, roughly 3/4 inch. Rinse off the surface starch and dry them thoroughly, or they will stick and steam instead of browning. Butter alone is likely to burn before they are cooked through, so use butter with a little neutral oil.
- The twelve onionsThese are small whole onions, not twelve chopped ones: peeled pearl or cipollini, cooked slowly in butter for 20-25 minutes until browned and tender all the way through.
- YieldSomething like a pound and a half of cooked meat with the garnish will serve four. Everything is best finished at roughly the same moment, since the arrangement is the point and reheated potato balls lose their shape.
Gulyás takes its name from the Hungarian gulyás, a herdsman of cattle, and the dish is generally traced to the open-fire cooking of the Great Plain, where beef was simmered with onions, lard and paprika into something between a soup and a stew. The version here has been through the drawing rooms of Western Europe: the beef has become calf's head, the lard has become butter, there is no caraway and none of the pinched noodles, or csipetke, traditionally served with the dish, and the whole thing is plated as a centrepiece ringed with turned vegetables in the French manner. That transformation is exactly what a book of this kind was for. Collections of "foreign" recipes published for English-speaking households around the turn of the twentieth century are often said to have kept the national label while quietly rebuilding the dish on a foundation of stock, butter and brown sauce, which is what their readers' cooks already knew how to make. Calf's head, meanwhile, was still an everyday economy cut, sold cheap and prized for the gelatin it gave a sauce.