paprika hendl (or paprikahendl, or chicken paprikash, or whatever it’s called) is good! but it has made me realize something
I need to buy myself a dutch oven
(the chicken stuck badly to the pan multiple times, because the only pots I have that were big enough are not seasoned very well, and now I crave the stability that only cast iron can provide)
still! I now have very tasty food to eat for the rest of the week!
so at a used book store a couple months back i found an annotated copy of dracula, and now that dracula daily is a thing, i’ve finally gotten around to reading it.
they have the fuckign. chicken paprika recipe that knocked out our boy johnny.
now you too can upset your mild-mannered stomach so badly that you have fever dreams of a sexy haunted castle
“I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem. get recipe for Mina.)”
—
“My dear Count …what on earth distracted you?”
Someone called Jonathan a Himbo and I was reminded that he had time to do a full double take before Dracula even made the decision to defenestrate his mirror.
(Everyone and their Mother has already made this joke but I am a simple man with a one tack mind.)
I didn’t think I’d be looking up recipes vaguely alluded to in a 125 year old book in the year of our lord 2022, yet here I am, gleefully awaiting an e-mail update from my friend Jonathan, and ‘Paprika Hendl’ is delicious.
And though I, like Jonathan, am similarly afflicted with being British, I was not unduly ravished by thirst
I’m here to answer the question once and for all about our friend Jonathan’s experience with paprika hendl. Sort of.
In The New Annotated Dracula (yes, there are two, and the “new” one has an intro by Neil Gaiman), the dish is described with a quote from John Paget’s 1850 book, Hungary and Transylvania. I won’t go into detail because it’s gory and this is Tumblr, but he says the recipe calls for “an inordinate quantity of red pepper, or paprika…”
Okay, okay, I hear you, paprika is red pepper. But sometimes red pepper is cayenne, not paprika. And sometimes paprika is sweet, and sometimes it’s spicy. So assuming Mr Paget said red pepper OR paprika, he probably considered one to be spicy and one to be sweet. Which one doesn’t matter, because the reader also probably imagines one is sweet and one is spicy.
“Or” means take your pick.
In other words, your pepper may vary, and Jonathan happened to be served the spicy one.
so at a used book store a couple months back i found an annotated copy of dracula, and now that dracula daily is a thing, i’ve finally gotten around to reading it.
they have the fuckign. chicken paprika recipe that knocked out our boy johnny.
now you too can upset your mild-mannered stomach so badly that you have fever dreams of a sexy haunted castle
