A simple dish, a complicated history.
Ask a Hungarian to explain true goulash (or gulyás, as they will more accurately call it) and you will first get a wary question: “Do you mean the soup or the stew?”
This reply hints at how elusive one true goulash is–at least outside of Hungary. What began as a hearty peasant dish with beef, chopped onion, carrot, parsley root, and caraway seed evolved over the years as Hungary’s borders ebbed and flowed. The all-important ingredient of paprika, for instance, arrived on the scene with the Ottomans in the 16th century–just behind tomatoes, which came to Europe from the Americas around the same time. Stretch the populace further afield as waves of immigrants went to the United States starting in the mid-1800s and influences on the famous dish continued to expand.
Google “Hungarian goulash” and then “American goulash” and you’ll see an utter lack of resemblance between the two. The former looks to be a thick and meaty stew. The latter, meanwhile, is as chaotic and undefinable as its adopted country–complete with ingredients as alien to the Magyars as elbow macaroni.
Neither, many Hungarians would argue, is true “gulyás”.
What is then? And how and why has the name come to mean so many other things?
The Real Deal
Hungarians will answer: Real gulyás means gulyásleves–which is to say, the soup.
A broth with vegetables and meat (usually beef), it is traditionally made in a kettle that hangs over a fire, called a bogrács. Agnes Barath, Hungarian food expert, cooking teacher, and founder of Culinary Hungary describes the ideal setting for cooking goulash as a social occasion.
“The traditional way of making goulash is outside, cooking over a fire. This gives it a fantastic flavor, and the idea is to have time to socialize while cooking.”
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The most critical elements to a successful, traditional goulash are caraway seeds–the “secret ingredient,” according to Barath. And of course, high-quality paprika.
“It’s all about the paprika,” echoed Jeremy Salamon, owner and head chef of Agi’s Counter, a Jewish and Eastern European-influenced restaurant in Brooklyn.
To be specific, “sweet paprika, which southern Hungary is famous for,” explained Katalin Gulyás, an English teacher from Orosháza.
And yes, she shares her surname–a common one in Hungary–with the famous dish. Like Smith or Baker in English, it references the work someone once did–in this case, a herdsman. Gulyás comes from gulya, which means cattle.
Gulyás (Katalin) is also a fan of adding cumin and substituting a healthier oil for lard–despite admitting the latter is more delicious.
Those minor tweaks aside, every Hungarian I spoke with rattled off identical basics: “It’s really simple at its core, just onion, beef, stock, and high-quality paprika,” as Salamon put it.
But the story doesn’t end there.
The Pot Thickens
The denser version most foreigners tend to anticipate when they hear goulash, Barath says, is something else entirely. “We don’t call it ‘goulash’–it is a beef stew,” she says.
This blurring of the parameters of goulash may well have coincided with the evolution of the country itself. It’s hard for example to talk about Hungary–as far as what it physically is or was–without touching on the Treaty of Trianon which drastically reduced its borders in 1920. Bits of what had previously been Hungary found themselves within other nations, which have since changed further. Scratch a bit of northern Serbia, western Romania, and southwest Ukraine, for example, and you’ll find a considerable Hungarian touch.
This explains the inclusion of goulash on the menu of New York’s Veselka, a beloved Ukrainian restaurant that has been in business since 1954. Their version came with the restaurant’s former cook Ola, who hailed from a region of western Ukraine that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
“Goulash was one of these culinary names adopted by the Ukrainians,” explains Olesia Lew, Veselka’s executive chef. “It is both a general term for stews and for the specific dish from the Hungarian kitchen. In Ukrainian cuisine, it is a stew of beef or veal with onions, paprika, pan jus, and broth thickened with flour.”
Salamon, who is second-generation Hungarian American, also departs from the original in his version.
“While I adore my grandmother’s, which is nostalgic and reminds me of Sunday dinners at her home, I sought to try out different versions. I’ve introduced different cuts of meat like beef cheek and short rib. I’ve also added fermented peppers and fish sauces.”
His grandfather, he thinks, wouldn’t have been a fan. But “my Grandma Agi”–his restaurant’s namesake–“was all for ‘Americanized’ recipes. She would love it.”
The first sizable group arrived following the failed revolution of 1848, according to the Embassy of Hungary in Washington, D.C. Another came between 1890 and the start of World War I, when roughly 1.7 million Hungarians filled industrial cities and mining regions, mostly from rural areas. Goulash first appeared in an American cookbook in 1914, according to the award-winning writer and tastemaker Sarah Copeland.
The group that arguably had the greatest impact on goulash as Americans understand it today, she believes, came in the 1950s. In the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 about 30,000 Hungarians came to the U.S. as refugees, according to Peter Pastor’s “the American Reception and Settlement of Hungarian Refugees in 1956-1957”.
“My belief is that they brought [gulyás] with them and it slowly degenerated from the classic,” says Copeland. “That timing was so important – it was postwar, and there was an incredible amount of emphasis on convenience foods and products.”
Many of these conveniences made their way into the dish–for example, pasta took the place of nokedlí, a type of small dumpling. Fresh vegetables from the garden took a backseat to meat, now plentiful and relatively inexpensive, that could cook long and slow on the stove inside. This gradually migrated to overnight slow cookers, pressure cookers, and now the Instant Pot.
“The vegetables, the brothiness, the paprika, the tomatoes–those are what make the flavor,” Copeland explains. “The meat is somewhat interchangeable because it is secondary to the aromatics. Here in the U.S., people eat fewer vegetables, have less access to vegetables, and there’s a push on convenience foods.”
In other words, the brothy soup that is a stalwart in Hungarian cuisine just didn’t get translated properly because, given the cooking culture of the day, people just didn’t have the time.
“In church and community cookbooks, ground beef is substituted for beef or veal,” says Lew. “It has become a norm for a ‘quick goulash’ because it was more affordable than veal. As we became more industrialized and moved to two-income households, the traditional kitchens have become a thing of the past.”
It has, she says, by default become the responsibility of restaurants, chefs, food writers and cookbook authors to hold onto food traditions – or perhaps not. “It’s a bit of a debate!”
Which is part of the fun. All the Americans I spoke with were passionate about Hungarian cuisine and considered flexibility and innovation an inherent part of the tradition.
“Because Hungarians are innovators, I felt the freedom to interpret,” said Copeland.
“Food does not know boundaries or politics,” added Lew. “It follows the holder to wherever that person lands.”
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