Papricaș and polenta

What it is

Papricaș is the Banat plate that sits at the exact meeting point of Hungarian, Serbian and Swabian cooking. It is not goulash, though visitors often confuse the two. Goulash is a soup or stew built on beef and caraway; papricaș is a quick sauté of chicken or veal, finished with a sour-cream and paprika sauce that coats the meat without drowning it. The paprika is the point. In Timișoara it comes from the plains around Szeged and Arad — sweet, deeply red, never bitter. You will see it sold in small paper packets at the Piața Flavia market, and every cook has a favourite brand. The sauce is thickened with flour and sour cream, sharpened with a little vinegar or white wine, and served with mămăligă — the Romanian polenta, cooked from coarse yellow cornmeal, turned out onto a wooden board or a plate, and cut with a length of thread.

The dish arrived in Timișoara in layers. The Ottomans brought the pepper plant from the New World via the Balkans in the seventeenth century, but it was the Habsburgs who, after 1716, settled German-speaking farmers from Swabia, Lorraine and Luxembourg across the Banat. Those Swabian households kept paprika in the kitchen alongside noodles and dumplings. The Serbian community, concentrated in the districts of Fabric and Iosefin, cooked its own paprika stews. Hungarian rule after 1867 made paprika the national spice of the empire's eastern half.

The mămăligă is older. Corn arrived in the Banat in the eighteenth century and replaced millet as the staple of the poor. For most of the nineteenth century, mămăligă was peasant food, eaten three times a day, sometimes with nothing but a little lard and salt. Papricaș was a Sunday dish. The pairing only became a restaurant staple in the twentieth century, and in the communist period it was standardised into a canteen dish: too much flour, not enough paprika, meat that had given up its flavour. That is the version many visitors still encounter. The good versions in Timișoara today are a deliberate return to the older, sharper, less gluey sauce.

What you actually see

How to read it

The first thing to read is the colour. Paprika loses its potency after a few months, and a kitchen that buys cheap powder or keeps it too long will produce a sauce that looks brownish rather than brilliant red. Fresh sweet paprika from the Banat has a scent like dried tomatoes and hay. You can smell it when the plate arrives. If the sauce is dull, the dish will be dull. The second thing is the consistency. A proper papricaș is not a stew. It should be saucy but not soupy — the kind of sauce that clings to the back of a spoon but still runs. If it sits in a pool on the plate, the kitchen has added too much water or not reduced it enough. If it is stiff, they have used too much flour.

Then look at the meat. Chicken papricaș is more common in homes; veal papricaș is more common in restaurants and is the better test of a kitchen, because veal is expensive and unforgiving. The meat should be in pieces you can cut with a fork, not shredded. If you see a lot of small, uniform cubes, you are probably eating frozen meat. If you see a bone or a piece of skin, that is a good sign. The mămăligă should be served separately, not already plated under the sauce, because it will go soggy. In good places it arrives in a wooden board or a warm ceramic dish, and you spoon the papricaș over it yourself. If it comes already assembled and lukewarm, the kitchen is rushing.

The last thing to read is the room. Papricaș is a lunch dish, not a dinner dish. In Timișoara, the places that cook it properly are busy at 13:00 and half-empty at 20:00. If you are the only table at lunch, be suspicious. Look at what other people are eating. If half the room has the same orange-red plate and the same yellow wedge, you are in the right place. If the menu offers papricaș alongside pizza and pasta, you are not. The dish also changes with the season. In summer, the sauce is lighter and more acidic, often with fresh tomatoes. In winter, it is heavier and darker, sometimes with a spoonful of lard. Both are correct. Neither is a tourist version unless it tastes of nothing.

Worth it, or not

For most visitors, papricaș is worth one proper lunch. It is the clearest edible expression of what the Banat is: a place where Hungarian, Serbian, German and Romanian kitchens have been borrowing from each other for three hundred years. It is also a dish that is hard to find done well outside the region. In Bucharest you will get a generic stew; in Budapest you will get a different dish with the same name. In Timișoara, at a handful of places, it is still cooked as a matter of local pride. That is worth an hour and fifty lei. It is also a heavy meal — sour cream, pork fat, cornmeal — and if you are planning a long afternoon of walking, you may want to eat it for lunch and skip dinner.

Skip it if you do not eat pork or dairy. Papricaș is almost always made with sour cream, and many versions start with lard or bacon. There are restaurants in Timișoara that will make a dairy-free version, but the result is not the same dish — the sauce loses its body and its sharpness. Skip it if you are vegetarian: the paprika sauce without meat is just a sauce, and the vegetarian versions on offer are usually an afterthought. Skip it if you are looking for a light lunch. The plate is dense, and the mămăligă alone is enough to put you to sleep. And skip it if you are in a hurry. A proper papricaș is cooked to order. If it arrives in five minutes, it was reheated.

Also skip the tourist-facing places in Piața Unirii that put papricaș on a menu next to schnitzel and burgers. They are not dangerous, but they are not the point. The dish is best in the neighbourhoods — Fabric, Iosefin, Elisabetin — in restaurants with no English menu and a television showing football. You will pay less and eat better. If you only have one meal in Timișoara and you want the local thing, this is it. If you have two, have papricaș for lunch and something lighter for dinner. If you have three, have papricaș twice, at two different places, and taste the difference. That is the real guide.

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