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When one analyzes the quality of a meal, so much depends upon circumstances that may seem superficially incidental to it.
The rain had nothing to do with the goulash. Neither did September's first clouds, low overhead and thick, tarnished like old pewter. Or the fact that finally, since what seemed like an awfully long summer ago, it was cool, almost cool enough to be thought chilly.
None of that matters to the meal before us. But it does. We're at Scape, the oddly named restaurant that seems to have lost the tilde that once preceded, nonsensically, its name. And it's raining. The first serious rain that's fallen in St. Louis since before the Fourth of July. Cloudy, soaking; even 24 hours ago, the thought of a hefty, hearty dish of goulash would have seemed impossibly heavy, way too rich. Now, sitting warm in a booth looking out onto Maryland Plaza as a woman scurries by on the sidewalk, jacket snugged around her, being pulled along by the wind batting on the trembling curve of her umbrella, that goulash is what's for dinner.
"Goulash" is a word that's often the European equivalent of "chop suey." A culinary catch-all term. In the cooking parlance of your grandmother, it probably meant a hodge-podge of leftovers, heated, with noodles or potatoes stirred in. Even the "real thing" is elusive. Goulash must be a stew, slow-cooked, on that much its devotees agree. It must feature cuts of meat loaded with collagen that renders down throughout the long braising, bringing that lip-smacking savory sensation to the meal. Paprika is essential. After that? Goulash is pretty much a free-for-all.
Scape's version isn't rocket-surgery complex. Thick slabs of boneless beef short ribs, each about the size of a pack of playing cards and three times as thick, is tumbled into a pot of tomato paste, red wine, paprika, and beef broth and braised so long and gently the meat is transformed. The ribs emerge intact, not mushy or flaky dry, but moist, with enough meaty texture to give some resistance to the fork, and with more than enough consistency to hold all the flavor of the braise in every bite. One elusive flavor you're detecting is the caraway seeds in the braising liquid. They're a standard goulash ingredient. They're used here with enough restraint their herby, licorice tang doesn't overpower; it only adds to the taste. The other flavor is the difference: smoked paprika, deeply pungent and more powerful than standard issue paprika. It's unmistakable, expensive, essential to a good goulash.
The rib meat alone is spectacular. Scape, though, adds another element to the dish that elevates it into the must-try category. The usual starch paired with traditional goulash is what is formally called galuska in Hungarian but which most Hungarian home cooks call csipetke, "pinched" flour nibbles no larger than a fingernail. The menu here calls them spaetzle, the German version that's more familiar. Same thing, though. Tender nubbins, perfectly cooked little bird's tongues that come from dough rapidly scraped into a pot of boiling water. A bed of the csipetke soaks up the thick, dark red juices of the braised meat. It's all arranged in a cast iron casserole and comes to the table hot, fragrant, satisfying.
Take the chef's suggestion: go with the fried egg on top. The egg breaks as soon at the fork touches it; the golden creamy yolk runs down into the meat and the dumplings, adding to the richness. We wanted to ask that chef where he'd gotten the idea of the egg. It's fiakergulasch, a Viennese version of goulash that goes back to the mid-1800s, when the increasingly desperate Emperor Franz Josef of Austria connived with Hungarian nobility to clumsily cobble together the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An empire that lasted long enough for Hungarian classics like goulash to spread to Vienna and other cities in Austria. It lasted until 1918, when the Italians defeated the inept armies of the Empire, armies that, in their final battles, were not only without food or ammunition but, given the dissolution of the alliance between Hungary and Austria, lacking even a nation to fight for. (Still. The Italians?)
We thought about asking the chef if he knew about that. Knew that a fiaker was a horse-drawn coach and that goulash with a fried egg was, along with a "repair beer," a common cure for hangovers among the men who drove those coaches through Vienna's streets. We thought about it. But there was still a rain-whipped wind outside, and how enjoyable is it to sit at a warm and cozy table, happy to be there and not in the wet and cold on the other side of the window? And there were still a few bites of goulash left. And a couple of sips, at least, of a simple Côtes du Rhone, an '09 Mon Coeur, a blend, with enough Syrah to cut through the tomatoey spiciness of the goulash.
So we let it ride, Franz Josef, the fried egg, and the hard-drinking Viennese coachmen. And instead savored the last of the goulash and the wine. And watched, through the big windows of Scape, as autumn came.
Scape
48 Maryland Plaza
CWE
314-361-7227
Dinner Tues-Sun, Sun brunch
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
