Gulyás

Name: Gulyás
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 2 h 15 min
Total time: 2 h 40 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: the Alföld & Hungary
Ingredients: 900 g beef shin or chuck, in 3cm cubes; 900 g onions, finely chopped; 100 g pork lard, or 6 tbsp oil; 4 tbsp sweet Hungarian paprika; 1 tsp hot paprika, or to taste; 1 tbsp caraway seeds, crushed; 4 garlic cloves, crushed; 2.5 tsp salt, or to taste; 2 long sweet peppers, in rings; 2 tomatoes, chopped; 3 carrots, in thick rounds; 2 parsley roots or a piece of celeriac, chopped; 600 g waxy potatoes, in 2cm cubes; 2.2 litres water; 120 g plain flour; 1 egg; 0.25 tsp salt

the herdsman's paprika soup of the Hungarian plain: beef and onion in equal weight, a great deal of sweet paprika, and enough liquid to drink it

Origin: Szeged, the Alföld & Hungary

From the journey of Chilli Pepper.

The first thing to say about gulyás is that it is a soup. The thick stew that English calls goulash is pörkölt, and Hungarians distinguish the two firmly: gulyás is thin enough to eat with a spoon from a bowl, with potato and often small pinched csipetke noodles in it, whilst pörkölt is a dense braise served with dumplings. The confusion is a nineteenth-century export and it is very well established outside Hungary. The word means herdsman. Gulyás is a cattle-herder of the Alföld, the great plain, and the dish is what he cooked in a bogrács, a cauldron slung over a fire, from the animals he was driving. Its rise to national status is dated and political: in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Hungary asserted itself against Habsburg cultural dominance, the herdsman's stew was taken up deliberately as a national dish, and its spread through Europe followed. The paprika arrived later than the dish. Chilli reached Hungary through the Ottoman advance in the sixteenth century, was grown at first as an ornamental and a medicine, and only became the everyday seasoning of the plain around Szeged and Kalocsa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A gulyás before that was a meat and onion soup with black pepper. What made it what it is now was a New World plant arriving by way of Istanbul. The technical rule everyone repeats is that the paprika goes in off the heat. It scorches at a temperature well below frying and turns bitter in seconds, so the pot comes off the fire, the paprika is stirred into the fat and the onions, and the liquid goes in immediately afterwards.

Ingredients

Meat

900 g beef shin or chuck, in 3cm cubes

Aromatics

900 g onions, finely chopped

To cook

100 g pork lard, or 6 tbsp oil

Seasoning

4 tbsp sweet Hungarian paprika
1 tsp hot paprika, or to taste
1 tbsp caraway seeds, crushed
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2.5 tsp salt, or to taste

Vegetables

2 long sweet peppers, in rings
2 tomatoes, chopped
3 carrots, in thick rounds
2 parsley roots or a piece of celeriac, chopped
600 g waxy potatoes, in 2cm cubes

Liquid

2.2 litres water

Csipetke

120 g plain flour
1 egg
0.25 tsp salt

Method

Render the lard in a large heavy pot or a bogrács over a medium heat.
Add the onions and cook them slowly for twenty to twenty-five minutes until deeply softened and golden. Match the onion to the beef by weight; this is a Hungarian proportion and it is what gives the soup its body.
Add the garlic and caraway and cook for a minute more.
Now take the pot off the heat entirely and let it cool for half a minute.
Stir in both paprikas off the heat. Paprika burns at a low temperature and turns irreversibly bitter, and this is the one step that ruins a gulyás.
Return the pot to the heat and immediately add the beef and about a third of the water, stirring to lift the paprika off the base.
Add the salt, cover, and simmer very gently for an hour and a half, until the beef is beginning to yield.
Add the peppers, tomatoes, carrots, and parsley root with the rest of the water and cook for a further twenty minutes.
Add the potatoes and cook for twenty minutes more, until they are tender and just starting to break at the edges.
Meanwhile make the csipetke: work the flour, egg, and salt into a stiff dough, flatten it, and pinch off fingernail-sized pieces.
Drop the csipetke into the simmering soup for the last five minutes. They float when done.
Taste for salt and serve in deep bowls with bread. It should be a soup rather than a stew, so loosen it with hot water if it has thickened too far.

Notes

Paprika off the heat, always, and use a fresh tin: paprika loses its colour and sweetness within a year of opening and a dull tin makes a dull soup. Equal weights of onion and beef is not a misprint. Shin is the right cut, since the collagen is what gives the broth its texture over two hours. Keep it loose; if you want the thick version Hungarians would call it pörkölt and would use half the liquid and no potato. The csipetke are traditional and easily left out. It is markedly better on the second day.

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control