Chicken Fried Steak

Chicken Fried Steak

Chicken Fried Steak:

is the classic example of an inexpensive regional folk food utilized by working-class folk and generally categorized as comfort food.

The precise origins of this dish is unclear, but many sources attribute its development to German and Austrian immigrants moving to beef-growing areas of western Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and possibly further north into Kansas, who brought recipes for Wiener Schnitzel from Europe to the USA. Now I am still wondering why call it chicken fried steak and there is not one piece of chicken in this dish. So I did a litle research and found out that one of the earliest mentions of a similar food is a recipe for veal cutlets. By the late nineteenth century numerous cook books provided the recipe. At that time the delicacy was usually called pan-fried steak or country-fried steak, or some similar designation, and it was very similar to the fried pork cutlets so popular in the South, where the swine industry was much more important than beef production. Chicken-fried steak is almost identical to German schnitzel

The actual term “chicken fried steak” was probably developed in the 1930s. It is possible the name change for this recipe was due to the war with Germany.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Americanized sweet and sour chicken.

Goulash

Goulash

This thick, hearty dish was (and still is) a very popular dish among herdsmen in Hungary. This peasant dish got on the table only towards the end of the 19th century. Restaurants started to put goulash on their menus to. By the second half of the 20th century the soup became the number one dish of Hungary. It got this name because the herdsman of Hungary often travelled far from home on horseback with their sheep to find better pastures on the Hungarian plains. At nightfall the herdsman’s would build a fire, slaughter an animal and then cook it for several hours in a large pot hanging over the fire known as a bográc.

There are many different ways of making goulash, as it is with every dish. Goulash can be served with potatoes, dumplings, spatzle, or just as a stand-alone dish with bread.

Meatballs gehaktbal

Meatballs gehaktbal

Meatballs gehaktbal “Woensdag, gehaktdag!” (“Wednesday, minced meat day!”That is how it used to be up until the 1960s: on Wednesdays, virtually every Dutch housewife would serve minced meat for dinner. Even today, more traditional families and elderly people eat minced meat on Wednesday. Now why would a whole country eat the same food on the same day?

Shoarma

Shoarma

The problem with making shoarma, shwarma or donner kebab at home (and the word can be also spelled schwarma or shawrama) is that the original versions are all made on a vertical spit that turns in front of an open gas or charcoal generated flame. A secondary problem is that the average skewer used is almost 1.5 cm. thick and holds between 8 – 10 kilos of meat. Cooking at home requires a different method and, of course, smaller amounts of meat.

Here, after a great deal of both rewarding and not all that rewarding experimentation, is the very best I can come up with. It may not be quite “the real thing”, but it will satisfy in many of the same ways.