A Tribute to Upstate Goulash

I walked into the Salvation Army soup kitchen on Friday morning, my weekly volunteer job, to see Sue, the cook, stirring up a huge vat of tomato and meat sauce, with several boxes of macaroni sitting on the counter.  "What do you call that?" I asked her. 

"Goulash," this lifelong upstate New Yorker said.

Ha! I knew it.

Maybe one reason (among many) that I’m not a famous chef is that the only family recipe that traveled from my grandmother, to her daughters and to theirs and to theirs is goulash. And we're not talking Hungarian. This is Upstate New York Goulash, a dish reflecting the lack of interest of generations of American women who live in the colder and flatter states in spending a lot of time in the kitchen.  This was the only dish a couple of my two dozen cousins remember my grandmother cooking.  (I never saw her cook anything.)  She had six daughters who took up that slack, and, as soon my mother -- one of those daughters -- could, she passed the goulash torch on to me. I was thirteen, it was the first dinner I ever made, and it wasn't tricky:  brown one pound of ground chuck (don't bother throwing out the grease); add one chopped onion, one can of Heinz tomato sauce, one can of Heinz tomato paste, garlic salt, dried oregano, dried thyme, salt and pepper, water.  Boil a pound of dried macaroni.  Throw everything together.  Serve.  I felt triumphant.  My pleasure in making this dish way surpassed the modest experience of eating it, but it set up a lifelong devotion to tomato sauce and whatever pal was around to absorb it.  And Upstate Goulash launched my love of cooking.

Although of course the origin for this dish is Italian, a recent article in the New Yorker provided some evidence that this variant originated in the WASPier parts of the Old Country. John Lanchester, a British novelist and former food writer, opened up his article "Shut up and Eat" with a description of "spag bol," the first recipe his mother gave him.  It was the essence of Upstate Goulash: a blend of "meat ragu of a northern-Italian type with the dry pasta beloved in the south."  He went on to write that spag bol was "sometimes said to be Britain's national dish."   Not fish and chips.  Not marmite.  But my very own comfort food, rerouted from Italy to the States via England, and like any British colonial territory, subdued during this process into a polite blandness.

As further proof of the indigenous aspect of this dish, a week or so ago, Michael, and I were driving with friends through Spencertown, about a half hour northeast of Hudson, and we spotted Dan's Diner, a beautifully restored relic that looks like a time machine.  The sign outside it read "Todays Special.  Goulash." 

"We have to have lunch there!" I yelled.  "I have to see if this is Upstate Goulash!" 

The diner was great looking and it was lunchtime, so everyone was agreeable. There were no tables, just two counters, one stretching underneath the window and the other overlooking the service area, where we chose to sit.  We beaded ourselves onto authentic but pretty uncomfortable wooden stools, and I peered over the edge of the counter at a large plastic bowl that I knew immediately contained the goulash of my childhood, macaroni and meat sauce.

I could lie here and say I ordered it and that it was a Proustian moment, but I had a very nice Reuben sandwich instead.  Let's face it, over the years I have retrograded the Upstate Goulash back into its much, much tastier Italian origins. The omphalos of my vegetable garden is the Roma tomato -- San Marzano and Scattalone -- around which grow things that adorn it, green chilies and eggplant, cilantro and basil.  I roast the tomatoes on the grill and process them. I cook the sauce for hours, studded with sautéed garlic, onions, and some chopped green chilies, before adding fresh basil at the end and freezing it for the winter.  The sauce is later defrosted and adjusted with other stuff -- red wine, rich stocks, mushrooms, sausage -- and then poured over, not only pasta, but eggplant, crepes, stews, and soups. 

At my sister's birthday party last week, we watched Jim, her boyfriend, make fresh linguini from scratch as a nest for a rich ragu, which included cream and chicken livers among its fabulousness.  I watched those long curls of linguini drift off of Michael's hand as Jim gently guided patches of shiny dough into his gleaming Atlas machine and wound the crank.  I went home, clicked on Amazon, and bought one. Another way of extending my favorite dish.  

Lanchester is somewhat uneasy, as I am, with our cultural obsession with food, how it's made, how it's cooked, and the current trends in food celebrity. (Is there really a problem believing that Bobby Flay beats George Clooney as the sexiest man alive?)  But even before the food rage started, I have loved cooking and all media related to it. I read cookbooks as if they were novels, starting with my mother's battered Boston Cookbook through those written by the wonderful Childs, Hazen, Wofford, and Kennedy.  I have watched cooking shows for decades the way guys watch sports; Julia Childs and the alcoholic Galloping Gourmet helped me get through a year in the mid-sixties on an Air Force base in Grand Forks. I’m not sure there's a morning during my entire adult life, which now stretches over half a century, when I haven't woken up thinking about what I would cook that night. And, even better, if what I’m cooking draws in lots of people.  Since I've moved up to Hudson, my wake-up list during the spring and summer now includes what I'm growing and in the fall what I'm processing. Even my volunteer work involves a soup kitchen and food pantry.  Cooking is therapy during sad hours and my healthy response to happy ones.

Those of us who binge on Chopped should not beat ourselves up; food is a natural obsession.  We're animals and as part of those souls, we are always looking to graze, hunt, and forage. I'm not a chef.  I'm one of zillions of women now and back into the caves who throw meat on the fire and grains in the pot for their families and, with luck, for some hungry Neanderthals who wander by.  And making that food taste better and showing other cooks how is as primal as singing and dancing around that fire pit.  It's an entirely lovable process.

Lanchester ends his article, which is mostly about the American food obsession over the past three decades, by telling the reader that he would be cooking spag bol that night "for the zillionth time."  Like me, he has offered up hundreds of variations with more depth and taste, but he always comes back to his mother's version: "onion, ground beef, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, wine, thyme, salt, a minimum of three hours’ cooking."  And his final wonderful tribute to his mother defines precisely what Upstate Goulash and this whole lifetime of cooking has meant to me: "She didn’t think she was saving the world by cooking. But she did know that it was part of the process by which she saved herself."