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Asking a grandma about goulash
Choosing a Seat
He had a little money but not enough for hotels, so he bought tickets at train and bus stations without asking where they went. Then he walked the aisle looking for an empty seat beside someone he could trust, because by the end of the ride he needed an invitation home. A beautiful woman with no rings on her fingers smiled at him, and he walked right past, since there was no way she was taking him home. He sat down beside the grandma in the back.
The Goulash Question
As the train rolled, he asked her what makes a great goulash. She spoke no English, so they tried charades until college students who wanted to practice English came over to translate. Her chest swelled as she described the care and love in her mother's goulash and her grandmother's, and she told the students that nobody on that train had ever asked about it until this young man came from thousands of kilometers away. He was coming home with her.
The Four-Day Party
The next night he sat at the head of her table, surrounded by neighbors, friends, and relatives she had called over. He tasted the goulash with his eyes closed, and the room went nuts. A four-day party broke out, then another man offered his father's homemade apricot brandy, which brought a week-long party and an invitation to Szeged, the world capital of paprika.
People kept passing him along to their friends, who waited at the bus station when he arrived. The tour went on for ten years.
Why is Szeged called the paprika capital?
Szeged sits in southern Hungary on the Tisza River, in the country's main paprika-growing region. Peppers arrived in Europe from the Americas and became a staple of Hungarian cooking by the nineteenth century. The mills of Szeged became known for grinding the dried pods into powder. Szeged paprika now holds protected designation of origin status in the European Union.
How did paprika lead to a Nobel Prize?
Albert Szent-Györgyi, a biochemist at the University of Szeged, was trying to isolate vitamin C in the early 1930s. He had worked with adrenal glands, which yielded only tiny amounts. Szeged's paprika peppers turned out to hold far more, so he could extract the vitamin in large quantities. He received the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries about vitamin C and cellular oxidation.
Why was goulash first a herdsman's soup?
The name comes from gulyás, the Hungarian word for a cattle herdsman. Herders on the plains cooked meat and onions in iron kettles over open fires. Paprika entered the recipe in the nineteenth century. The dish became a national symbol during the same period, as Hungarian identity grew stronger.
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