ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Today's Found Recipe is perfect for a cold winter day. It's spicy. It's meaty. It's a real belly warmer. But we start with a scene from a real heart warmer, the romantic comedy "When Harry Met Sally.
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SIEGEL: No, not that scene. No.
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MERELYN CHALMERS: A paprikash is essentially a casserole, a Hungarian casserole.
SIEGEL: That's Merelyn Chalmers. There's never too much pepper in her paprikash - only about a fourth a teaspoon, in fact. Chalmers is one of the women behind Australia's Monday Morning Cooking Club, a group dedicated to collecting recipes from the best home cooks in Sydney's Jewish community. Their cookbook includes a recipe for Mum's Rice Paprikash. Mum being Merelyn Chalmer's late mother, a woman who survived Auschwitz.
CHALMERS: My mum was Hungarian and we ate paprikash probably five nights a week. This was something that she just threw together when I wasn't feeling well or my brother. And I moved to Sydney many years later thinking that this was a nothing dish that my mother threw together in a pressure cooker. And I realized that there were all these daughters of Hungarian women in Sydney. We have quite a large Hungarian-Jewish population, and they had all grown up on the same dish.
I make it a couple of times a winter. You can do it with veal or beef or chicken. You fry off onions till they're very, very dark golden brown. You sear the meat till it's a very dark golden. Then you add in a little bit of fresh capsicum, as we call it in Australia - that's pepper, red pepper in America. And then you put in some beautiful, good quality Hungarian paprika spice.
My mother would then put in a touch of garlic and a little bit of carrot to get some extra sweetness, only a little bit. You cook it slowly like a casserole.
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CHALMERS: For me personally, it's like mother's milk. It is tenderness emotionally, as well as tenderness in the bite of the meat. And it really minds me of my mum.
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SIEGEL: That's Merelyn Chalmers of the Monday Morning Cooking Club. And you can get the recipe for Mum's Rice Paprikash on our Found Recipes page at NPR.org.
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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is NPR.