Central Europe · Volume 20, Lard, Bryndza and a Court Cuisine That Passed Overhead

Kulajda

Name: Kulajda
Total time: 45 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: The Czech Republic and Slovakia
Ingredients: 30 g dried mushrooms; 500 ml stock; 50 g butter; 30 g plain flour; 150 g potato, diced; 4 eggs; 50 g dill, chopped; 2 tbsp vinegar; 100 ml cream; to taste salt, caraway

South Bohemia

Kulajda, a sour cream, mushroom and dill soup: a pale cream coloured soup in a wide shallow bowl, dark strips of rehydrated mushroom and flecks of chopped dill scattered across the surface.

Illustration

Time: 45 minutes

Researched: 27 sources cited

South Bohemia, spread nationwide only in the second half of the twentieth century. A sour cream, dill and mushroom soup, often with a poached or stirred-through egg. Its popular "named for a cook called Adelheide" origin story is explicitly rejected by the standard modern academic reference on this cuisine; the name in fact derives from the regional dialect term for its own thickening method.

by South Bohemia

The dating is specific enough to name. Smažený sýr, fried cheese, moved from a 1930s haute-restaurant novelty into a standardised, cheap public-catering staple by the 1953 official restaurant norms, and had become, by the late 1970s, a fast short-order dish made in double breading from block Emmental or Gorgonzola in batter. Kulajda's spread nationwide from its small original South Bohemian home region is dated specifically to the second half of the twentieth century, entering official standardised public-catering recipes only in the 1970s. Cranberries with svíčková, widely assumed traditional today, were rejected outright by an influential 1897 Prague housekeeping-school cookbook and forgotten for decades, revived only through widely used postwar cookbooks. None of this makes these dishes fake. It means the word "traditional" in a Czech kitchen frequently means "fixed under socialism," not "unbroken since the Middle Ages," and a chapter that pretends otherwise is not being honest with its reader.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 45 minutes plus soaking.

Ingredients

30 g dried mushrooms
500 ml stock
50 g butter
30 g plain flour
150 g potato, diced
4 eggs
50 g dill, chopped
2 tbsp vinegar
100 ml cream
to taste salt, caraway

Method

Soak the dried mushrooms in warm water at least 1 hour. Simmer in their soaking water with salt and caraway.
Add the diced potato and stock, and cook roughly 15 minutes, until nearly tender.
Make a roux from the butter and flour, whisk into the soup, and thicken over roughly 15 minutes.
Stir in the cream, dill and vinegar, balancing sweet against sour.
Break an egg into each bowl of hot soup, or poach the eggs separately and add whole.

What a modern chef changes

Dried mushroom flavour concentrated properly, and the egg treated with real technique rather than a rough crack into the bowl

Rung 2

Method

Rehydrate the dried mushrooms in a low oven, covered in their own soaking liquid, rather than a simple soak, extracting considerably more of their flavour into the eventual stock, a direct extension of this chapter's general rule that indigenous techniques reward a controlled, deliberate version of what tradition already does.
Poach the eggs separately at 63°C in a water bath, then slip them in at the very end, giving a fully set white and a genuinely runny, controlled yolk, rather than the more variable result of breaking an egg straight into a simmering bowl.
Finish with a small spoon of crème fraîche stirred through off the heat instead of adding all the cream during cooking, protecting the soup's acidity and freshness from the flattening effect of a long simmer with dairy already in the pot.

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