pörkölt

The great Hungarian chef and cookbook writer George Lang describes the pörkölt as "one of the four pillars of Hungarian cooking": the others being gulyás (usually rendered in English as "goulash"), paprikás (as in the most famous English-language version, chicken paprikash), and tokány. All of these are stews of one kind or another... but there are big differences between them, and of the three, the pörkölt may be the most interesting.

The word pörkölt means "singed". It's shorthand for a specific type of meat cookery for which there is no single word or term in English cooking usage. Normally a pörkölt involves covering the meat being used with just enough water to have almost completely evaporated by the time the meat is cooked. Meat used in pörkölt is normally diced (though the sizes can vary considerably, as they do in this dish). There is always paprika in a pörkölt. There is always onion, too, and sometimes other vegetables. Bacon is normally somewhere in the picture as well, and if there isn't bacon, there will be the Hungarian national cooking fat, lard. (The word will provoke high-caloric shivers of horror in some people, but the flavor of the lard is vital in this dish.)

Hungarians get passionate about pörkölt ingredients the way Irish cooks get into fights about whether or not to put carrots in Irish lamb stew. Tomatoes are a favorite ingredient in a pörkölt, and Hungarian cooks will get into endless arguments about the virtues of fresh tomatoes versus canned versus tomato paste. Some will insist on only beef or pork being used: others will say that poultry and game are OK as well. To prevent too much ruckus in the comments on the recipe, we're sticking to a fairly simple version that uses beef.

In this recipe, the slices of beef are pounded flat, browned in lard, and have onions fried in the same lard added to them; then paprika and finally the peppers and tomatoes are added, and all are cooked together until the meat is covered in a rich, much-reduced sauce. We served ours with sauerkraut and roast potatoes. Other possibly more traditional accompaniments would be dumplings or the tiny Hungarian pasta called tarhonya.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.