Results tagged “goulash”

The puszta - the great plain - is very important to Hungarians.  It may not sound very interesting to outsiders: it's the flattest part of the country, dotted with fairly shabby isolated farms, wells, marshland and perhaps not a great deal else.  But here it means more than that: it holds an important place in the Hungarian imagination and sense of national identity.

As we found out, though, it's also a place to hear lively folk music, eat the best bread and pork fat we've found so far (and that's saying a lot), and learn how to play the pig's bladder while cracking a whip. At least, it is if you're coordinated enough, which one of us was ...

Today Barnaby made real gulyásleves while staying in a little cottage in Csongrád.  Having researched what a genuine Hungarian goulash should be like, he altered Anna's previous recipe by using a) a greater assortment of vegetables including carrot, potato, celeriac, parsley root, tomato and pepper, b) caraway and paprika, but not too much of either, c) beef rather than pork, and d) lots of water so as to make it more soupy than stewy.  He has informed Anna that her previous version was more of a pörkölt or paprikás than a gulyás.