Central Europe · Volume 38, The Pepper That Came Late, the Herdsman's Pot and the Coffeehouse
Szegedi halászlé
Szeged, the Tisza
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 30
Szeged's fish soup in the city's own recipe, from szeged.hu: a stock of the heads and bones boiled about fifty minutes and pressed through a sieve (the two stage method of Rung 3), then the fillets thirty minutes more. The earliest traditional recipe the city cites is Rézi néni's, Teresa Dolecsko, in her cookbook as "halpaprikás halászosan", which we have not seen. The quantities are the city's; the salt and pepper are not weighed.
As tradition built it
Serves 8. About 1 hour 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 3kg whole fish: a carp of 1.5kg and a catfish of 1.5kg, filleted, heads and bones kept
- 4 medium onions
- 4 tbsp sweet ground paprika
- 1 tsp hot paprika paste
- 1 hot pepper
- 3 green peppers
- 3 tomatoes
- 4 tbsp oil
- to taste salt
- to taste pepper
- to cover water
Method
- Fillet the carp of 1.5kg and the catfish of 1.5kg. Put the heads, bones and trimmings in a pot with the onions, the hot pepper and water, and boil about 50 minutes.
- Press the stock through a sieve, pushing the flesh and onion through, and return it to the pot.
- Add the paprika, the paste, the green peppers and tomatoes, the oil, salt and pepper, and the fillets, and cook about 30 minutes more without stirring, shaking the pot.
- Serve with bread, and in Szeged with no pasta.
What a modern chef changes
The stock cleaner, the fish timed
Rung 3
Method
- Roast the heads before the stock and skim it; pass it through a chinois after the sieve.
- Bloom the paprika in the oil off the heat and add it to the strained stock, as the pörkölt does.
- Poach the fillets 12 minutes, not 30, at a bare simmer, lifting them when they flake.
- A Baja cook would add the noodles. Say which town you are in.