White freshwater fish soup (pre-paprika, 17th century) Period COrigin theory CVerified

The setting is the river country of Hungary, where the Danube and the Tisza flow. Carp, catfish, and pike-perch, the white freshwater fish, had long lived in these rivers and were a familiar food that people of the land came to early. The fishermen had no kitchen and no shelf of pots; they built a fire on the riverbank and dropped the day's catch into a bogrács, the suspended cauldron, to boil. It was a plain, practical dish that leaned on no spice.

This seventeenth-century fish soup held none of the paprika that dyes today's halászlé deep red. Paprika was originally a New World crop, and when it first reached Hungary by way of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, it was an ornamental plant. Only across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did it come down into the kitchen and take root as a spice. The fish soup of this stage, then, wore a different face, one that did not yet know the red heat that would later define it.

From the fourteenth century onward, travelers who visited the Tisza wrote of the river's abundant catch, and the fish they took was boiled or grilled for the everyday table. The practice itself, of fishermen boiling fish in a cauldron on the riverbank, reaches back that far. In later years paprika joined the dish, and through its spread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became the red halászlé of today. What this piece describes is the fish soup as it stood before that.

Halászlé has often invited a leap in reasoning. Because the fishermen's fish soup existed for centuries, the story goes, today's red, paprika-flavored halászlé must also have been complete by the seventeenth century or earlier. But the two belong to different stages.

What was old was the spice-free boil of white freshwater fish. The red paprika flavor that defines today's halászlé belongs to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and after, once paprika had spread as a culinary spice in Hungary. The path by which paprika became food is clear enough. In the sixteenth century it was known by way of the Ottomans as Turkish pepper; by the mid-eighteenth century records survive of paprika making up part of workers' wages around Szeged; and by the end of the eighteenth century it appears in cookbooks as a named dish. The red fish soup, too, first appears in the written record in the late eighteenth to nineteenth century, when Hoffmannsegg, traveling in Hungary, noted carp boiled with Turkish pepper.

The age of fish soup as a genre is not in dispute here. The travel writings that recorded the Tisza's catch from the Middle Ages onward, and the record of white fish being prized in the seventeenth century, all attest that riverside fish cookery has a long history. The problem lies in taking that age and applying it directly to the date of today's red halászlé. The fish soup before it turned red and the halászlé after are two things, alike in appearance but different in when they came to be. This dish points to the earlier stage, before paprika was known.