cook.
Ingredients
800 g beef shin or shoulder, in 2 cm cubes 400 g onions, finely chopped 60 g lard 2 tbsp sweet paprika 2 tsp caraway seeds, whole 3 cloves garlic, crushed 2 carrots, in thick rounds 1 parsnip root, in thick rounds 600 g potatoes, in 2 cm cubes 2 green peppers, in strips 2 tomatoes, chopped 2 l water salt, to taste 1 egg 100 g plain flour 1 pinch salt Method
Melt the lard in a heavy pot and cook the onions over low heat for 15 minutes, until they collapse and turn glassy gold. Do not brown them - you want them to disappear into the soup, not to taste roasted. Take the pot off the heat completely before the paprika goes anywhere near it. Stir it into the onions with a splash of water. This is the one step that cannot be repaired: on hot fat paprika burns bitter in seconds, and no amount of simmering afterwards will take that out. Return the pot to low heat, add the beef, the salt, the garlic and the caraway seeds crushed between your fingers, and stir to coat every cube. Cover and let the meat cook in its own juices for 15 minutes, stirring now and then, until the liquid it gives off has almost cooked away. Add water to just cover the meat and no more, then simmer very gently for 1½ to 2 hours. Top up with a little hot water when it drops below the meat - adding it all at the start boils the meat instead of stewing it, and you get grey cubes in a thin broth. Add the carrots and parsnip when the meat is about two thirds tender, around the 1¼ hour mark. Add the green peppers and tomatoes and cook for 10 minutes. Add the potatoes for the last 25 minutes only. Any longer and they break up and cloud the soup, which should stay clear enough to see the paprika in it. Make the csipetke while the potatoes cook: work the egg, flour and salt into a stiff dough, knead it smooth, and let it rest 10 minutes. It should be firm and dry, not sticky. Pinch irregular fingernail-sized pieces off the dough straight into the simmering soup and cook them for 5 minutes, until they float. Top up with water to a soup consistency and taste for salt. If it looks thick, thin it - gulyásleves is a soup, and thickening it with flour or sour cream makes it something else. Rest it off the heat for 10 minutes before serving, with bread and a pot of hot paprika on the table.