Hungarian Shepherd’s Stew
Comfort built from pasta, potatoes, pork and tons of paprika
When Lagos Buzder-Lantos offered to show me how he makes the paprika his wife would be using to prepare our lunch—a robust stew of pasta, potatoes and pork sausage—I didn’t realize we’d be using ordnance from World War I.
I’ll admit, it was exceedingly effective.
Erzsebet Buzder-Lantos had welcomed me to their home in Bokros, a village of 900 people in southern Hungary not far from the Romanian border. She was preparing a dish known variously as keménytarhonya and pásztortarhonya, or shepherd’s stew, a Hungarian comfort food her family has made for generations.
But first, the paprika. In the couple’s backyard, their farm sprawling in all directions where cats, chickens and dogs wandered—Lagos indicated a narrow, foot-tall steel bucket upright on the ground. In fact, it wasn’t a bucket, but a German artillery shell. Lagos filled it with handfuls of large, deeply red dried peppers they’d grown.
He hoisted a hefty metal bar, then let its weight smash downward into the peppers, crushing as it went. Up and down, he repeated, each time releasing a bell-like clang from the shell. He’d inherited the shell many years ago from an elderly neighbor whose father had brought it back from fighting in Italy.
It was easily the most effective mortar and pestle I’ve ever used, and it quickly reduced the peppers to a mix of powder, seeds and flakes, much coarser than conventional paprika. Lagos called it “broken paprika.”
With our paprika sorted, we headed back inside, where Erzsebet, a retired middle school geography teacher, pulled a bödön, or large red enamel pail, from under the kitchen sink. It’s the traditional vessel for storing pork fat, a backbone of the local cooking. Melting some in a skillet was the first step in her recipe.
“I learned it from my mother, of course,” she said. “My whole family was herdsmen, and the recipe is part of that tradition.”
Back in the day, herdsmen maintained small cottages in their fields. In them, they kept containers of tiny pellet-like pasta called tarhonya, potatoes, paprika, cured pork belly and a bödön of pork fat. “When it was made by the herdsmen, it had nothing else,” Erzsebet explained. “When it was made by their wives, it would also have pork sausage.”
Her version followed that basic equation, first toasting the tarhonya in the pork fat, then adding onion, peppers and small potatoes. Then the paprika started, 3 tablespoons that thickened to a rich paste in the fat. Don’t worry, she’d add more at the end. Then more peppers in the form of a puree spiced with mustard, nutmeg, cloves, allspice and black pepper.
This mixture cooked for a bit, the pasta plumping, before she added slices of paprika-saturated pork sausage. By now, her kitchen was awash in aromas that seemed to blend baking bread, sizzling bacon and tons of rich, sweet paprika.
When we ate it, it was a riot of flavor. The tender-chewy pasta was the perfect complement to the meaty sausage and fall-apart starchy potatoes. But, this being Hungary, it was the paprika that was the star. It seasoned, it colored and it served to thicken the stew. It convinced me yet again that when we use just a sprinkle, we don’t do it justice.
“I do it for my grandchildren. They love it,” Erzsebet said while showing grainy black-and-white photos of her herdsmen relatives. “It’s usually on Saturday. But if they ask for it, they can have it any day.”
