My mother’s side of the family is of hearty Eastern-European stock (German and Hungarian, with a touch of Romanian), so family gatherings always involve large quantities of hearty Eastern-European foods. One dish that is present almost without fail is Chicken Paprikash and Spaetzel (Paprika Chicken and Dumplings). Here I present a rough approximation of my mother’s recipe for this Hungarian meal-in-a-bowl. I say rough approximation because the only part of her recipe with any actual measures are the spaetzel ingredients, but the rest of the ingredients are pretty much what she hand-wrote for me from memory, with minor modifications¹. I will try to include approximate quantities, and will note any deviations from her recipe.

Chicken Paprikash and Spaetzel
Prep time: 30 minutes or so
Cooking time: about 90 minutes, with bursts of activity here and there
Serves: A lot, but it keeps well. See storage instructions below.

Equipment you will need:

• A pressure cooker large enough to hold an entire butchered chicken in a single layer
• A spaetzel maker
• A large stock pot (6 quarts or more)
• Random and/or semi-optional: Mixing bowl, wooden spoon, mesh skimmer, garlic press, knives, etc

Ingredients:

Chicken Paprikash in Broth
• One whole chicken
• One large white onion (My mother uses a yellow onion)
• Six cloves of garlic (Mom uses a tablespoon of pre-minced garlic from a jar these days. I prefer fresh garlic, and lots of it.)
• Hungarian paprika, regular or extra hot, depending on your taste. I prefer the hotter stuff, Mom is indifferent.
• Salt and black pepper, to taste
• Water
• 2 c. sour cream
• Optional: prepared chicken broth to increase volume, if neccessary

Spaetzel

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup cold water
• 2 tsp. salt

Directions:

Butcher the whole chicken. Try to separate the joints cleanly, as the pressure cooker will make the cartilage very soft and apt to detatch from the ends of the bones. If you want to keep it out of the soup, be careful. Also, try not to fracture any of the large bones to prevent the marrow from getting into the broth. I remove most of the skin from the torso, thighs, and drumsticks, but leave it on the wings until after they are cooked. You can throw the carcass in for the broth, but it is not necessary and you will likely end up with lots of little bones floating about. Place the chicken pieces in the bottom of the pressure cooker in a single layer and cover two-thirds of the way with water.

Dice the onion and add it to the pressure cooker pot. Run the garlic cloves through the press and add them, as well. If you do not have a garlic press, mince them finely with a sharp knife. Add salt and pepper to taste (1/4 tsp. or more each? Remember, this is for a whole chicken and a few quarts of broth.) Ignore the small- and large-hole shaker openings on the can of paprika and pop open the spooning/pouring side of the cap. Dump in a bunch. When you think you’ve probably added too much, you’ve gotten the quantity right. This is Chicken Paprikash, after all. I never measure, and neither does my mother, but I guess 3 tablespoons or so is a good ballpark figure.

Place the lid on the pressure cooker and let it cook for 20 minutes at 15lbs of pressure. While that’s going, you can make the spaetzel.

Put a large stockpot of heavily-salted water on to boil. In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, eggs, cold water, and salt. Stir well with a wooden spoon until there are no lumps. The batter should be viscous yet cohesive.

Now, a word or two about spaetzel makers. If you are going to make this recipe often, it’s worth the $10-15 investment. Basically, a spaetzel maker is a narrow, perforated tray, long enough to rest over a large stock pot, with guide rails down the long edges. On top of the tray is a hopper that sits in the guide rails. You fill the hopper with batter and slide it back and forth along the tray. The batter drips through the perforations in the tray, and if you move the hopper at a constant rate, you will end up with a pot full of fairly uniform little dumplings. You will end up with a few longer ones that drip out while you are loading the hopper, and a few short ones at the end when the hopper runs empty, but for the most part they’ll all be perfect little nuggets of boiled doughy goodness. If you opt not to use a spaetzel maker, you can spoon little blobs of batter into the water, but this takes forever and is not as magical.

Anyways, load the batter into the spaetzel maker and drip the dumplings into the boiling water. Let them boil for 10 minutes — they should all be floating at the top of the water when they are done. Remove them from the water with a slotted spoon or long-handled strainer. If you have a pot with a lift-out strainer insert, so much the better. Set the dumplings aside in a bowl and discard the water. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap to keep the spaetzel from crusting over.

By this time, the chicken should be about done. Let the pressure cooker cool until it is safe to open. (Mine has a pressure gauge and a nifty little pressure-driven locking mechanism that unlocks when the internal pressure hits zero.) Carefully remove the chicken from the broth and set it on a tray to cool. The chicken will be very tender and prone to falling apart, and if you get any of the fiddly little bones in the broth, you will have to skim them out. This is difficult to do without picking up a lot of the onion and garlic. Pour the broth (it should be a dark orangey-brown colour) into a large stockpot and let it rest.

Once the chicken is cool enough to handle, remove the bones and remaining skin. The chicken will pretty much fall apart in your hands, so if you added the carcass, be careful to get all the ribs, vertebrae, and wing bones out. Be on the lookout for large bits of cartilage, as well. Hand-shred the larger pieces of meat into chunks that would reasoably fit onto a soup spoon. This is not difficult, as you pretty much just have to look at them funny and they will acquiesce.

Hopefully, your broth should have started to separate. There will be an abundance of fat floating on top, so skim most of it off by dipping a ladle into it and getting one edge just below the surface. Add the shredded chicken and the spaetzel to the broth and return it to a boil. If there is not enough broth, add some prepared chicken stock (homemade, canned, or water-and-bullion) to bring it up to a sensible volume. Add a bunch more paprika to the now-diluted broth. Once it is boiling, reduce it to a gentle simmer and let the temperaure even out.

Now add the sour cream and stir it in to melt it. If the broth is too hot, the sour cream will curdle, so it is important that you have let the pot drop to a simmer. You will now have a giant vat of chicken and dumplings in a pastel orange broth. It can be kept warm on the stove over low heat for a few hours before serving, if neccessary.

To serve, stir the pot (the chicken tends to sink and the spaetzel will float) and ladle it into bowls. Sprinkle some salt and (family preference) lots of black pepper over the top, and enjoy.

Storage:
Let the remaining stew cool completely before refrigerating, or the sour cream will separate out and clump. It will keep for at least a week in the refrigerator (maybe longer, but I’ve never had any last more than a week without being eaten), and can be frozen for months.

Summary:
This recipe makes a large quantity of very hearty food. It is perfect for cold weather, and tends to appear at all my family gatherings from Thanksgiving through Easter, alongside the traditional turkey, ham, and everything in between. You might think that you will never go through this much of it, but if you have friends with heavy Eastern-European heritage, you will never have trouble getting rid of it. The first time I made this at home for myself, half of it was gone by the end of the day.

[1] There is even variation in the recipe within the family; my grandmother does not pressure-cook the chicken, and serves it separately in larger pieces, over which one ladles the broth and spaetzel.