Paprikás csirke

Name: Paprikás csirke
Total time: 1 h
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Hungary
Ingredients: 1kg chicken thighs and drumsticks; 3 medium onions, chopped; to taste garlic; 2 medium tomatoes; 1 medium green pepper; 1.5 tbsp lard, or goose or duck fat; 1 to 2 tbsp sweet paprika; to taste salt; as needed water; 200ml sour cream; 1 tbsp plain flour, whisked into the sour cream

Hungary, first in Czifray's cookbook of 1830

Paprikás csirke, chicken braised with onion and paprika and finished with sour cream: chicken thighs and drumsticks in a pale orange sour cream and paprika sauce on a white plate beside a heap of small egg dumplings.

Illustration

Time: 1 hour

Chicken in a paprika and onion braise, finished with sour cream: the dish on Mihály Markus's tariff of 1834 at 18 krajcár. The weights below are Pais-Horváth Szilvia's for Pénzcentrum, 2021; the garlic is to taste, as she gives it.

by Hungary, first in Czifray's cookbook of 1830

Paprikás csirke under that name is first found in the fourth edition of István Czifray's cookbook, 1830; its first menu appearance is the handwritten tariff of Mihály Markus, innkeeper of Nyíregyháza, in 1834, at 18 krajcár; the English physician John Paget ate it at the Bárándi inn in Bihar and praised it in his travel book. Hortobágyi húsos palacsinta was created by Endre Papp, head of the Mátyás Pince, for the Brussels World's Fair of 1958, filled with veal pörkölt and sauced with sour cream, with meat pancakes in cookbooks from 1896 before it; it is not a Hortobágy dish. The mangalica dates its Hungarian breeding to 1833, when Archduke Joseph the Palatine brought two boars and ten sows to the Kisjenő estate, which is now Chişineu-Criş in Romania; the breed came from the Serbian Šumadija pig crossed with Bakony and Szalonta stock.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

1kg chicken thighs and drumsticks
3 medium onions, chopped
to taste garlic
2 medium tomatoes
1 medium green pepper
1.5 tbsp lard, or goose or duck fat
1 to 2 tbsp sweet paprika
to taste salt
as needed water
200ml sour cream
1 tbsp plain flour, whisked into the sour cream

Method

Cook the onion in the lard, or goose or duck fat, until soft; off the heat, stir in the paprika; add a little water.
Add the chicken thighs and drumsticks, garlic, tomato, pepper and salt, and water to come halfway; cover and simmer 30 to 40 minutes.
Lift the pan off the boil and stir in the sour cream whisked with flour, and warm it through without boiling.
Serve with nokedli.

What a modern chef changes

The cream held, the skin kept

Rung 2

Method

Brown the chicken skin side down in the fat before the onion, and lift it out; the onion cooks in the chicken's fat and the skin stays crisp.
Temper the sour cream with a ladle of hot sauce before it goes in, and hold the pot at 80 degrees.
Pass the sauce through a chinois before the cream, for a restaurant's smoothness.
Finish with a dusting of paprika on top, bloomed in a spoon of hot fat.

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