Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise: or, It's a beautiful day for those who love onions

They had me at "The correct frying of the onions is very important."

Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise 1 chicken (or 3 to 4 pounds of chicken meat) 1 pound onions 2-3 tbsp chicken or bacon fat* 1 tbsp paprika 1 cup water 1 clove garlic, pressed or chopped ½ cup tomato puree, fresh or canned 1 tbsp flour Cut chicken into serving pieces. Rub it with salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste. Set aside. Cut onions in half from top to bottom. Then slice diagonally as thinly as possible. Heat chicken fat in a large skillet. Add onions and cook, stirring constantly, until lightly golden brown. Add paprika and fry for about a minute longer. Then add water, bring to a simmer, and cook over medium-low heat for about 5 minutes. Add the chicken, garlic, and tomato puree. Stir constantly until the chicken takes on a reddish brown color. Then cover the pan and allow to steam over low heat until chicken is tender. Stir in the flour, beating very hard where it lands in the skillet so that you break it up before it can form lumps. Allow to simmer for another ten minutes. *If you don't obsessively save your bacon drippings like it's still 1935, cooking oil will obviously be fine. Note: This is also very good made with stewing pork, cut into 2-inch-ish pieces before cooking. Mrs. Florence Sokol; 836 Washington Street, Cape May, New Jersey; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 30 August 1935; page 12

I do like a good onion or five, and Mrs. Florence Sokol's "Paprika Chicken A La Viennoise" promised to deliver. 

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 30 August 1935; page 12

I don't know if this recipe has any connection to Vienna, but it looked too good to care. A lot of recipes begin with an offhand "brown the beef and onions," but today we are told that the correct preparation of the onions is crucial to Chicken Paprika A La Viennoise. I've never met Mrs. Sokol, but I like her after just one recipe.

Lately, I've been using frozen chopped onions in all my recipes so I can skip the business of cutting them up myself. But slicing them into rings is a lot faster than chopping them. I may not have managed to get my onions as "like fine noodles" as Mrs. Sokol specified, but I didn't skimp on the onions either.

If in doubt as to the weight of your onions, always round up.

It turns out that onions expand a lot when you cut them. Our onion rings overflowed the bowl.

Even though we cut the onions a lot faster than usual, it still threatened to be an eye-watering task. Fortunately, a friend of a friend gave me this charming fan from his shelf of unfinished projects. (The phrase "just get it out of here" was deployed.) It needed nothing more than a new power cord and a new motor wire to blow my tears away.

Reading further down the recipe, tomato puree gets involved near-ish to the end. The grocery store didn't have any, so we got canned tomatoes and blenderized them.

Having gotten all out preparation done, it was time for the bacon drippings to meet the skillet. Before the pandemic, I would never have bacon drippings on hand. But as I have mentioned (often), the ever-rising price of food has caused me to obsessively save all the pan-drippings that I threw out in happier pre-pandemic times.

I soon found that I did't melt enough bacon fat for a Mrs. Sokol-approved deluge of onions. I say this in the most excited way possible.

We carefully watched the pans and got the onions to a golden color. After all, as Mrs. Sokol says, "the correct frying of the onions is very important."

 

Mrs. Sokol calls for one tablespoon of "imported paprika." But since she sent this recipe to the newspaper during the Depression, hopefully she would understand why I used store-brand paprika instead. I made sure to use a lot, though.

 

At last, we were ready to get everything into the pan. I didn't buy a whole chicken but a tray of leg quarters. They nostalgically remind me of Canada. Restaurants on this side of the border rarely serve whole leg quarters that you have to cut up for yourself. 

At this point, we only needed to cover the pan and let it mind its own business while we loaded the blessed dishwasher.

I regretted using chicken leg quarters as soon as I served this. I don't mind cutting meat at the table (after all, I chose to cook it like this), but today's chicken skidded all over the tomato-lubricated plate and pushed the correctly-fried onions onto the tabletop.

 

Self-inflicted inconvenience aside, the chicken was tender and tasted exquisite. We served the tomato-sauced onions on the side as a vegetable. Even the people who aren't onion fanatics liked them.

The tomato sauce in which everything swam became marvelously rich as everything simmered. I think leaving the bones in the chicken helped a lot. As you can see, it became quite gelatinous in the refrigerator. Twenty years after she got her recipe in the paper, Mrs. Sokol could have unmolded this onto a plate of lettuce and called it a salad.

The gelatinized leftovers unnerved everyone. They remained leery of the Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise even after the microwave made it look normal again.

I made this again a week later, but I used stewing pork (which I cut into small-ish pieces) instead of chicken. I figured the recipe's long simmering time would cook the meat until quite tender. Also, it seemed like a welcome change from the usual crock-pot pork we've been having every week since pork got so cheap. And... it's divine. I cannot recommend it enough.

In closing, this recipe is delicious regardless of whether you use pork or chicken in it. Just as I hoped, you absolutely cannot go wrong with a recipe from someone who gets opinionated about onions.