Mason-Dixon Recipes

Slumgullon (American Goulash)

By all accounts, Slumgullion stew falls in the category of clean-out-the-refrigerator or everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of meal.

         — Shared Tastes

Slumgullion, also known as American Goulash or beefaroni, has a number of definitions. It can mean either a low, worthless person; a servant; a cheap nasty drink; or what is of most interest here, a cheap meat stew. It's odd that they all mean something of low value, when in fact, they aren't. The food slumgullion, for example, may be cheap to make, but is anything but cheap tasting.

I’ve eaten beefaroni all my life, but never considered adding it to this cookbook because, well, it always seemed kind of ordinary. To be fair, though, I never looked up a home recipe for it.

Enter the name slumgullion. I’m a sucker for odd-sounding names of food. Where I first heard it, though, Is just as odd.

I had grown fond of watching old, black and white westerns like “Wanted, Dead or Alive” (a young Steve McQueen), “Rawhide” (a young Clint Eastwood), “Have Gun Will Travel,” (was Richard Boone ever young?), and so on. It was in an episode of Rawhide when a fight among the cowpokes got broken up. The cook walked up to one and said,, “Have some Slumgullion and calm down.”

“What in the world is slumgullion,” I thought. So, I went and looked it up and that’s how it ended up here.

The history of slumgullion seems to be that it came from the slums of England before the 1900s. There was no recipe recorded at first because very few of the poorer class knew how to read or write—it was simply handed down. It began to appear in cookbooks around 1914.

At first, there was no basic recipe. People just used what they could find. If they had some sparrows, pigeons, mice, or rats, that's what they used. They would put the meat in water with onion and salt to kill the oder of the meat cooking, then they added some vegetables and thickened it with flour. When it was thick they would serve it over potatoes or by itself.

Some years later, it was called mulligion and served over mashed potatoes or put in a pastry shell pastry and called Mulligion pie. It's most likely where the old rhyme "Five and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" came from (Recipes Digest V4 #069 by Murray Hackett on Mar 09, 1997).

Slumgullion is not the same as Hungarian Goulash (Gulyás), which features slow-simmered beef chunks in a paprika sauce. Slumgullion contains a ground meat (usually beef), a pasta (usually elbow macaroni), and a tomato-based sauce. Different aromatics like onions or spices can be added according to taste.

INGREDIENTS

1 lb ground beef
¹/₂ lb elbow macaroni, cooked
1 14-oz can tomato sauce
1 14-oz can diced tomatoes
2 cups beef broth
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp salt
¹/₂ tsp oregano
¹/₂ tsp parsley flakes

DIRECTIONS

Brown meat and drain. Add tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and beef stock. Stir in garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, and salt. Finally, add cooked macaroni and then reduce the heat to medium low and simmer for 15 minutes.

Sprinkle parsley on top and serve as is.

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