My grandmother from my father’s side used to make an incredible gulyas. Tasty, really tasty. I sometimes remember it and I find myself daydreaming about the times when my grandparents still lived in this world, about their kindness and their wisdom, about all the food I know from them and all the food I didn’t get to learn from them. I have tried several times to recreate the taste of the mutton dish that my grandmother used to make, I got close, but just not enough. Of course, this may be an incessant search, because I’m not browsing through a gastronomic library, but through the library of my own memories in which things seem to be strongly connected to the people with whom I have lived certain moments. I fear that if people are missing, the memory refuses to reveal itself in other circumstances. Maybe that’s just life. The best part is that these searches always result in good things and new memories. For example, the mutton soup (lamb, ram) which I will present further on.
You absolutely must use meat with bone for this dish (chops, ribs, necks). One on hand, because the bone adds a lot of flavor, and on the other hand because the meat on the bone is very tender and it becomes even more so through cooking. For 8 servings, you need one kilogram of meat. Boil it three minutes in water with peppercorn and a bit of salt. Throw the water and put the meat in five liters of clean, cold water. Leave the pot on low temperature for an our, with the lid off. Clean and wash four parsley roots, not too large, one large or two small onions, a small celery, a turnip cabbage the size of a lady’s fist, five-six carrots and two potatoes. Cut all of them into small cubes. Put them to boil along with the meat (except the potatoes). When the carrots are boiled, put the potatoes in the pot.
Boil five large tomatoes, peal and core them. Mash them or chop them with a knife, then mix them with sweet paprika, a tablespoon of freshly ground pepper and 150 milliliters of boiled borsch (borsch from a bottle, not a pack, placed in a pot on fire and boiled). Put these in the pot and leave them at low temperature for another quarter of an hour. Add a few parsley leaves, a handful of chopped lovage leaves and two-three celery leaves.
Put the lid on and turn off the fire.
Special thanks to
Oana Bodnariuc, Authorized Translator
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