Chicken Paprikash Soup

Chicken Paprikash Soup

My adult friends will not be surprised to know that I was different from other kids. I read about food, cuisines, cultures, and languages when my childhood friends were into comic books and cartoons. While we all came together on the baseball field, that's where the common interests ended.

My food orientation started early. I have memories of making crème anglaise at five or six year old, up on a stool at my mother's stove. My food curiosity was always in high gear, even as a grade schooler. I could break down whole chickens before I hit my teens. If you believe in predestination and preordination, it should be no surprise that I ended up being a professional chef.

I recall being fascinated by Hungarian cuisine at an early age—no doubt from avidly reading my parent's subscription to Gourmet magazine—for no other reason than it seemed so foreign. In the 1970s, outside of a handful of major US cities, there were few ethnic restaurants and no place to eat something as alien as Hungarian food. My curiosity would have to be satisfied from books.

In 1971 when I was nine, famed New York restaurateur George Lang published his now landmark cookbook called George Lang's Cuisine of Hungary, with its nearly 150-page lovingly curated history of Hungarian cuisine as a preface to a treasure trove of recipes.

Although I knew of the book early on, it wasn't until I was 18 or 19 that I managed to get a copy for myself from a little bookseller on Elliewood Avenue in Charlottesville, VA when I was a student at the University of Virginia. I read that book—and hundreds of other similar seminal cookbooks—cover to cover.

For me, reading cookbooks is not about learning recipes but about reading critically and distilling to the essence, comprehending the history, metaphors, and techniques of the cuisine so that those can inform my own cooking. Mr. Lang's book was among the best I ever read for conveying the essence of a cuisine.

One of those essential ideas that I took from Lang's book is the holy trinity of Hungarian cooking: onions and paprika sweated in lard. While only a fraction of dishes in the Hungarian repertoire include paprika, onions, and lard, it is a signature forever tied to the cuisine.

Just as a cuisine has an essence, those techniques and ingredients that make it unique in the pantheon of cuisines, so does a single dish have an essence. To understand a dish's essence, it is necessary to compare many recipes from many cooks.

Comparing recipes quickly shows what is theme—the essence of the dish—and what is variation—the improvisation of the individual cook. The theme, the essence, is what you should be after when learning a new dish. Once you have the theme in hand, the basic melody, then you can riff.

Now in the age of world interconnection, it is trivial to compare recipes, clicking instantly between web pages. Before Internet, however, to understand a dish such as paprikash, I would compare seven or eight recipes from as many books piled all around my chair. My collection of Hungarian cookbooks comprised 15 to 20 volumes before I retired and donated my 1000-volume collection to the local culinary school for their library.

I wonder if my children can even imagine sitting in a chair with a pile of books and physical bookmarks, surfing old school. I wonder if they even know the tactile delight of reading a book. I miss my books like I miss my now scattered-to-the-wind children, even as my fading eyesight makes it difficult to read other than a backlit screen.

By my mid-twenties, after I had added the basic themes of paprikás, gulyás, pörkölt and many other Hungarian stews to my culinary arsenal, I devised the soup that is the subject of this rambling essay as a riff on, an homage to, a tribute to paprikash.

Imagine traditional chicken paprikash as plated for restaurant service. A pile of tiny boiled dumplings similar to spaetzle would be in the center of a large soup plate. A meltingly braised chicken leg would be perched on top, accompanied by a couple of ladles of glorious paprika-hued roux-thickened sauce ladled over, the whole drizzled with a thin sour cream.

For my variation on the classic theme, I crafted a one-pot soup with all the elements of paprikash except for the roux, a soup that could serve several people with minimal effort and minimal clean-up. After 35 years of riffing on this dish, my variation now has its own variations.

For the most basic form of the soup, I would typically poach a chicken in a soup pot, remove it, pick the meat, and reserve it. Then I would sweat onions in lard until just translucent, add paprika and garlic, and cook that for a minute. The onion-paprika mix would go into the boiling chicken stock along with noodles. As the noodles were nearing being cooked, in would go the reserved chicken meat to reheat. Off heat, after the noodles were done, I would stir in a bit of sour cream and serve it.

At some point after falling in love with Spanish cuisine, I veered away from tradition and substituted bacon and bacon grease for the lard and the oh-so-sexy pimentón de la vera (smoked paprika) from Spain for paprika from Szeged. Bacon, at home, is the easiest way to render lard, albeit smoky lard, now that the restaurant and its buckets of lard for confit are in the rear view mirror. The resulting absolutely delicious bacon-inflected dish was true in spirit but with a smoky departure that is foreign to Hungary.

And for my wife, who likes chicken breast far more than do I, in some versions, I remove the breasts from the chicken and make the stock with the remainder of the bird, then reserve the cooked chicken meat for some other purpose, such as chicken salad or chicken tacos. I then cube the raw chicken breast, sear it in the bacon grease, and add it to the soup just as the noodles go in, timed such that the chicken and noodles are just cooked at the same moment.

Notice that dumplings don't play a part in this soup. I love them and we made hundreds if not thousands of pounds of them at the restaurant. I don't love the extra work and the extra mess to clean up, now that I have a kitchen staff of one person to both cook and clean. So noodles it is.

I use the cut called Dumplings from No Yolks, because they are a decent quality soup noodle and available just about everywhere. As a how-coincidental aside, these noodles are manufactured in the New World Pasta plant in the city of Winchester, Virginia, where Ann and I lived before moving to Oregon. Execs and suppliers would often eat at my restaurant. I once had a fascinating conversation with one of the suppliers of pasta dies, pasta making being something we did at the restaurant on a decidedly non-industrial scale.

Chicken Paprikash Soup

1 fryer chicken, 3-4 pounds
Kosher salt, to taste
1/2 pound bacon, sliced or diced
1 large yellow onion, sliced
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup or more fresh Hungarian paprika
12-16 ounces wide noodles
2 cups sour cream

Cover the chicken in water in a large soup pot and slowly bring to a simmer.
Add a teaspoon of salt.
Poach the chicken until done, 90 minutes to two hours.
Remove the chicken from the stock and let it cool.
Pick the meat from the carcass and reserve the meat.
Render the bacon in a sauté pan.
When the bacon is nearly crisp, add the onion and sweat until limp and translucent.
Add the paprika and garlic and cook for another minute, stirring well.
Bring the chicken stock back to the boil and add the pasta.
When the pasta is nearly done, add the onion mix and the reserved chicken to the soup.
When the pasta is done, turn off the flame and let cool for a couple of minutes.
Stir in the sour cream and add salt as necessary.

Mushrooms are really good in this soup, if you feel like adding some.