Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Pörkölt

Pörkölt is another of those old family recipes, this one from my dad's paternal Hungarian family, by way of my grandmother and mother (the men in dad's family were not particularly big on cooking.)

As near as I can tell, pörkölt just means "stew" or something equally generic, and from what I have gathered on the internet, every family has their own recipe using a wide variety of ingredients...just like everyone has their own version of that which we call chili.

This one is my pörkölt:

Brown about a pound of cubed beef in a large, heavy-bottomed pot with a good lid (or, if you want to do it the Crock-Pot way, in a frying pan. Or if you like washing dishes, go ahead and use the frying pan and you'll dirty a pot later.) Remove the meat and drain off some of the fat, unless you used very lean meat, in which case don't bother to drain it.

In the reserved fat, saute a chopped onion and a chopped green peppper until the vegetables are soft. (My mom and grandmother never used green pepper. I saw it in a recipe I found in a cookbook [pre-Internet, before I knew there were so many pörkölt variations] and thought 1. it must be more authentic that way and 2. it'd be healthier if I snuck in another vegetable. My grandfather was a notoriously picky eater; for all I know he's the one who got rid of peppers in our case.)

Add the beef back in and mix it up with the vegetables. If you want to do this in the Crock-Pot, here's where you transfer to the crock. (My mom always made this in her Le Creuset French oven, so when I left home a Le Creuset French oven was one of my first kitchen purchases...a tad pricy, but I have never regretted it. What I have been doing, and I just found this out about two weeks ago, is mispronouncing "Le Creuset" for my entire life. I am mortified. I should have known it...I don't speak French, but I know enough French words, and I should have realized there was a "zay" in there, not a "set"...and what's worse, my mom never corrected me. She thought it was funny. Is it any wonder I am how I am, with parents that cruel?)

Anyway, we were making dinner. Okay, you've mixed your browned beef cubes and your sauted onion and pepper back up in a big pot of some sort, right?

Now add paprika. Hungarian paprika, I hope it goes without saying, but the type of paprika is where I make another break from family tradition. My mom and grandmother used sweet; I like hot. I like to give the meat a nice thick coating of it...I think it works out to about 3 tablespoons...but this is definitely going to be a matter of personal taste. (I think from my experience I like my food three times more paprika-y than average Americans.)

Pour a can of tomato sauce over the paprika-covered meat and vegetables. I use a regular can (15 ounces?) because I prefer a thick sauce (and lots of it; the sauce is what this recipe is all about); my mom and grandmother used an 8-ounce can and added a little water (half a can or so, I think.)

Stir it up a little, then simmer over low heat for at least a couple of hours. If you are using a Crock-Pot, all day on low. (This is a perfect Crock-Pot dish, as a matter of fact. If you don't use the Crock-Pot, it's a good one to make a day or two ahead and just heat the night you're eating it.)

Check the sauce...add paprika if it's too bland. Add some tomato juice if you don't have enough sauce (or if you went too heavy on the paprika, I guess)...this is where the good lid helps keep your liquid in.

When I was a kid we had this with (on top of, actually) mashed potatoes. I'm not a big mashed potato fan, so I started serving it over egg noodles. Then I found (in a small town in southern Alabama, of all places) dried spätzle, which is how my great-grandmother served it. (Well, actually she made her spätzle. I hope she isn't spinning in her grave now at the thought of dried spätzle.)

Anyway, spätzle can be hard to come by...one of my local supermarkets stopped carrying it, and I was having my ex buy it for me in his neighborhood store, but now a different chain store near me has it again. Oddly enough it hasn't shown up in the yuppie grocery store...maybe it's too old Europe. If you've never heard of it, it's like little egg dumplings. It isn't your lowest-fat starchy side dish, though.

So there you have it...pörkölt and spätzle, dinner of umlauts.

Posted by Nic at March 23, 2004 09:04 PM | TrackBack