or How to Make Jókai-bableves (Pork and Bean SouP, Jókai-Style)
Yeah, a recipe is not something you’d expect to find on a music/audio blog, but bear with me, here.
Back in September, I worked with Christophe Chavanon at Kerwax Studio in Brittany on the new Withchthroat Serpent album, Trove of Oddities at the Devil’s Driveway. Withchthroat Serpent are an excellent Doom Metal/Stoner Metal group from France, and they chose Kerwax for their latest project because they wanted to record live to 24-track tape, which is exactly in what Christophe and Kerwax specialise.
From left to right: Djé (guitar), Niko (Drums), Marie Chavanon (studio owner), Christophe Chavanon (recording engineer, mixing engineer and studio owner), Fredrik Bolzann (guitar and vocals), Ügo (bass and keyboards, me (recording engineer), Anikó Tóth (social butterfly)
Photograph by Ügo Greifengeier
Now, that’s an album cover!
On the final day of mixing, we decided that we would all have lunch together. Witchthroat Serpent provided a delicious roast duck and craft ales, while my contribution was one of my favourite Hungarian dishes, Jókai bableves.
(Almost) how Jókai bableves should be eaten. Plenty of wine and Erős Pista (Strong Steve), a hot paprika paste, akin to a Hungarian harissa paste.
Jókai bableves, or Bean Soup Jókai-style, is named after Hungary’s own Charles Dickens, the writer Mór Jókai, who regularly ordered the dish on his visits to a restaurant in Balatonfüred on Lake Balaton in Hungary.
The soup went down very well, and I’ve had a couple of requests for the recipe from Djé, the guitarist from Witchthroat Serpent, and Marie Chavanon, the co-owner of Kerwax, so I thought I’d make my take on the soup widely available through my blog.
This blog also feels quite timely, as I’ve just recently become a naturalised Hungarian, which makes me extremely happy. I’ve always loved Hungary. It’s a country that felt like home from the first time I set foot there.
Also, Hungarian food is excellent. It’ll send you to an early grave, but it tastes so good.
Lovely knitted Hungarian flag on a congratulatory card from our talented friend Jo and her family…
Disclaimer: I didn’t learn this recipe from a Hungarian; nor did I find it in a book. I just reverse-engineered my favourite Jókai bableves and made use of the Hungarian cooking techniques I had learnt when making pörkölt and gulyásleves. This is just my take on the soup and how I like it.
here’s how to make the soup:
You will need:
The biggest cooking pot you have
A big lump of lard
500g of diced pork
1 big onion, finely diced
800g tin of red kidney beans
800g tin of white haricot beans
Loads of paprika - ideally, this would be Hungarian paprika, but if you can only get sweet paprika and smoked paprika, you will need to make a mixture of the two and then add some cayenne pepper and some ground chilli.
Salt
Pepper
Water
First up, you really have to embrace the love of lard if you want to cook remotely authentic Hungarian food, so melt a big lump of lard into your biggest pan over a very low heat. Once the lard has melted, turn off the heat and add the pork.
At the same time that you add the pork, you will need to add your salt, pepper and paprika. Hungarians love their food much saltier than the Brits or the French, so you might want to be quite generous with the salt.
Depending on where you live, the paprika might be a bit of a problem. Where I live in France, I’ve not been able to get hold of Hungarian-style hot paprika, just the sweet and smoked kinds, so what I do is mix those two together and mix in some cayenne pepper and chilli powder, which seems to work fine. You will want to pour in a big pile of paprika (or the aforementioned paprika mixture), then stir the pork around with a wooden spoon until all the meat is coated in lard and paprika.
This next phase is the most important: the pörkölés (the “stewing”). You cover the pan and turn the heat back on, but make the flame as low as possible. The meat then stews in the lard, its own fat and all that lovely paprika for about an hour, or until the fat and the paprika has reduced to a sort of wet paste.
Tip: Try to avoid taking the lid off constantly to stir the mixture. What I do is lift the pot, keeping the lid on, to shake all the meat around. If the meat has stuck to the bottom, you will have to open up to unstick it with a wooden spoon.
Controversially, this is where I add the finely-diced, large onion. Often in this kind of cooking, the onion gets done before the meat, but I do it this way round, and it’s my recipe, so there.
Cover again and stew for another hour, or until the concoction starts to look like a thick curry.
Once the onion has disintegrated and the whole thing looks like a bright red meat curry, you can add water and mix it all together. Don’t fill the pot up completely with water, as you need to save space for a lot of beans.
Rinse the beans, and then add them to the pot. You can add more water, here, if needed.
The next ingredient is the most important: Time.
You will want to cook this soup on a low heat for a few hours. The longer, the better, really. In fact, for the best results, cook it for a few hours the day before you want to serve it up. This is one of those recipes that is always better the next day.
When you finally do serve it up, add a big dollop of soured cream. If you can’t get hold of soured cream, crème fraîche is an acceptable substitute.
Enjoy!
If you want to hear the first single from the album, The House That Dripped Blood, you can find it on YouTube, below.