Goulash Soup

Start with the bacon, because it's doing two jobs at once: flavouring the fat that everything else fries in, and giving you a salty, smoky crumb to scatter back in near the end for contrast. Any streaky, smoked bacon works; if you only have unsmoked, that's fine too, you just lose a layer of flavour you'll need to find elsewhere — a bit more black pepper, maybe a splash of something smoked if you have it. Don't skip draining it on paper — the point of frying it first and removing it is so it doesn't go soft and sad sitting in liquid for two hours; it goes back in at the very end, crisp edge still just about intact.

The vegetable base — onion, garlic, celeriac, carrot — is there to build sweetness and body before the meat ever arrives, which is just the French mirepoix logic wearing Hungarian clothes: soften alliums and roots in fat until their sharp edges round off, so the whole pot has something underneath the beef and paprika besides water. Celeriac can be swapped for parsnip or simply more carrot if you can't find it — the point is a mild, earthy root, not the specific vegetable.

Beef shoulder is the right cut because it's cheap for a reason that works in your favour here: it's full of connective tissue that a quick-cooking method would leave tough, but given the two to three hours at a gentle simmer, that same tissue breaks down into gelatine and makes the soup silky rather than just wet. Chuck or shin do the same job. Do not reach for a "nicer" lean cut like sirloin thinking you're upgrading the dish — lean meat has nothing to break down, so long cooking just dries it out and toughens it further, the opposite of what you want.

Paprika and cumin are the spine of the flavour, and quality matters more than quantity: paprika loses its colour and perfume sitting in a cupboard for a year, so if yours smells of cardboard rather than fruit and smoke, use more of it or accept a muddier soup — there's no technique that fixes stale spice. Tomato paste and tinned tomatoes both go in for acidity and depth, not as the backbone; if you're short on one, lean harder on the other rather than skipping both, because the acid is what stops the soup tasting flat and one-note after two hours of simmering fat and meat.

Potato goes in late, in the last twenty minutes, for a simple reason: it cooks fast and falls apart if it sits in a bubbling pot for two hours, turning the whole soup starchy and cloudy instead of clear-ish with distinct pieces. Doneness isn't a timer here either — push a knife or fork into a cube, and if it slides in with no resistance, it's done; the clock is just there so you're not stabbing potatoes every ninety seconds.

On a domestic hob, a "wide pan instead of a kazan" means your simmer will want to catch at the bottom more than in a deep, heavy pot — so keep the heat at the gentlest bubble you can hold, a lid ajar if your lid seals too well and traps too much steam, and check it now and then rather than trusting it to look after itself for three hours unsupervised, the way it might in a proper thick-walled pot. A splash more stock or water if it's reducing too fast is not a failure, it's just reading the pot. Finish with crème fraîche and herbs at the table, not in the pot — stirred in early, the fat and heat will split it, and you'll get little curdled flecks instead of a cool, rich ribbon through each bowl.