Red, Delicious: How Paprika Became Jews’ Favorite Hungarian Spice

Sweet or hot, stewed in goulash or rubbed on chicken, this versatile spice is a staple of the Jewish-American kitchen

By Leah Koenig for Tablet Magazine

“I’ll have what she’s having.” Those five words, uttered during the infamous orgasm-at-Katz’s-Deli scene in When Harry Met Sally, are arguably among the most legendary to emerge from 1980s cinema. But my favorite line in the movie comes from a different scene, when Harry (Billy Crystal), on a stroll through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, coaxes Sally (Meg Ryan) to repeat after him in a goofy, zayde-inflected accent: “Waiter, there is too much pepper on my paprikash.” The line itself means very little, spoken mostly as a means to a flirtatious end. But there is something so utterly charming about Crystal’s impish delivery—something so irresistibly New York, and undeniably Jewish—that I fall for Harry’s shtick every time.

I was a child of the 1980s, and that scene also first introduced me to chicken paprikash, or paprikas csirke in Hungarian. Since there’s no Hungarian ancestry in my own family, the country’s famous stewed chicken dish, which turns rosy under the heavy influence of sweet paprika, never appeared on our table. Over the ensuing decades, I have probably eaten the dish only half a dozen times. Still, I feel an unspoken connection to chicken paprikash as a food of my people. Like Harry, the dish—and a liberal hand with the paprika shaker more broadly—has always seemed implicitly Jewish.

In Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen, the memoir of the late New York restaurateur George Lang, he recounts leaving his parents’ home at 19 to report to a Nazi labor camp. Lang, who would eventually go on to direct the Four Seasons and resurrect the famous Café des Artistes on New York’s Upper West Side, maintained a deep connection to Hungarian food throughout his life. Tellingly, he writes about the supplies he took with him as he bid his childhood home goodbye: “Almost as important a part of the backpack inventory as my books, was a well-wrapped slab of paprika-coated ‘bacon,’ my mother’s rendition of the real thing … made out of the sides of a well-fed goose.”

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