Jókai bableves

Name: Jókai bableves
Total time: 11 h
Yield: Serves 8
Cuisine: Hungary
Ingredients: 1.5kg smoked pork knuckle, csülök; to cover water, for the knuckle; 500g dried beans, soaked overnight; 150g semi-dry sausage; 150g carrot; 100g parsley root; 1 tomato; 1/2 hot green pepper; 1 clove garlic; 1 bunch fresh parsley; 2 tbsp plain flour, for the roux; 1 tbsp lard, for the roux; 1 tbsp sweet paprika, for the roux; 100ml sour cream, to finish; 100g plain flour, for the csipetke; 1 egg, for the csipetke

Gundel, Budapest, 1937 by a recipe site's account

Jókai bableves, smoked knuckle, dried beans, sausage and pinched pasta in a thick soup: a deep bowl of thick reddish brown bean soup with pieces of smoked pork knuckle, slices of paprika sausage, small pinched pasta and rounds of carrot.

Illustration

Time: Hands on 3 hours · Waiting 8 hours

A thick bean soup of smoked knuckle, sausage and pinched pasta, attributed to Károly Gundel, who named it for the novelist Mór Jókai; what the connection was, nobody we read says. The knuckle, the beans and the sausage are weighed as the recipe sites give them; the vegetables, the roux and the csipetke follow Károly Gundel's recipe as Magyar Konyha prints it, whose own meat and bean weights, for six, differ from these. The sites disagree on the csipetke's minutes, five against ten to twelve.

by Gundel, Budapest, 1937 by a recipe site's account

Rétes was made in the Carpathian basin from at least the sixteenth century with Balkan filo ancestors, and the first written strudel recipe cited is a manuscript of 1696 held in the Vienna city library. Vienna and Hungary share it, and the earliest surviving recipe is Viennese. József C. Dobos presented his torta at the 1885 national exhibition in Budapest, a cake that would keep without refrigeration, published the recipe in 1895, and it became a hungarikum in 2019; the stories of a kitchen boy's sugar for salt mistake and of Elisabeth and Franz Joseph tasting the first cake are anecdotes told after famous inventions, and we tell them as told. The Gundel building has served since 1894; the Gundel family took the lease in 1910, and Károly Gundel made it the standard, Hungarian and French together, naming dishes for his guests: Újházi chicken soup for the actor, Jókai bean soup for the writer, Munkácsy eggs, Feszty beefsteak. The restaurant was nationalised in 1949 and the family, as ethnic Germans, was forcibly moved to a farm in 1951; it was bought in 1991 and reopened in 1992. Jókai bableves is attributed to Károly Gundel and first published, a recipe site says, in his Kis magyar szakácskönyv of 1937; what Mór Jókai had to do with the soup beyond its name, nobody we read says. Somlói galuska came later than its reputation: the idea was Károly Gollerits's, Gundel's head waiter, and the pastry chef József Béla Szőcs, who ran the Gundel pastry shop from 1956, made it and named it for the Somló hill of his home town. A late 1950s invention in a nationalised restaurant.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 8. About 3 hours, plus an overnight soak for the beans.

Ingredients

1.5kg smoked pork knuckle, csülök
to cover water, for the knuckle
500g dried beans, soaked overnight
150g semi-dry sausage
150g carrot
100g parsley root
1 tomato
1/2 hot green pepper
1 clove garlic
1 bunch fresh parsley
2 tbsp plain flour, for the roux
1 tbsp lard, for the roux
1 tbsp sweet paprika, for the roux
100ml sour cream, to finish
100g plain flour, for the csipetke
1 egg, for the csipetke

Method

Simmer the knuckle in water to cover about 2 hours on a medium heat until tender; keep the stock.
Cook the soaked beans in their soaking water with the tomato, hot pepper and garlic for 1 to 1.5 hours, until half soft, then add the knuckle's stock, the carrot and parsley root, and the meat picked from the bone.
Make a light roux of lard and flour with paprika, thin it with stock, and stir it in with the sausage in slices.
Knead the flour and egg for the csipetke to a stiff dough, pinch it into small pieces and cook them in the soup 5 to 12 minutes. Finish with sour cream and parsley.

What a modern chef changes

The smoke measured

Rungs 2 and 6

Method

Soak the knuckle 2 hours in cold water first if it is a heavy cure, and taste its stock before any salt.
Cook the beans in a pressure cooker 20 minutes and finish them in the knuckle stock; they take the smoke without going to mush.
Skip the roux and blend a ladle of beans back into the pot for the thickness.
Serve the csipetke made with egg only, no water, so it stays firm in the bowl.

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