Day 17 - Dictionary definition

 DICTIONARY DEFINITION

Prompt - Dictionary definition : Open up a dictionary to a random word.  Define what that word means to you.

PAPRIKA

Paprika is such a useful spice, one I've been using in cooking for all my adult life, but the word itself brings up three main associations for me.

The first goes way back to my childhood.  My mum got a herb and spice rack for the kitchen, something she clearly regarded as a sign of her modernity and progressive thinking (and perhaps her aspirations), a cooking aid the previous generation would never have thought of having.  At least not in working class households.  One of the spices in the rack was, of course, paprika.  I forget what dishes she used it for, it wasn't a commonly used ingredient, but I do remember that she also used the word to describe peppers.  Or called them 'paprika peppers'.  Now it's true that paprika spice comes from dried peppers, albeit not from the same varieties we commonly find in our supermarkets, but I have no idea where she got the idea that the word could be used for the vegetable as well as the spice (you know, the one that was clearly marked PAPRIKA in her prized spice rack).  

But then my second paprika-related recollection also features an abuse of the language.  In the eighties I frequently cooked a dish that included liver, tomatoes, peppers and paprika in the list of ingredients.  It was one of my specialities - probably because liver was so cheap and in the early eighties I was so broke.  I always called it liver goulash.  Why?  I don't recall it being based on any actual goulash recipe.  But I knew that goulash had meat and it had paprika and that was good enough for me to be pretentious.  You might be able to guess who I got that trait from.

And back to the present.  There are four varieties of paprika sitting in my spice cupboard, but only one of them has become a magic ingredient.  Doesn't everyone have a few magic ingredients in their cupboard, the ones you always turn to when something you're making requires that extra bit of oomph?  Smoked paprika falls into that category for me, a spice of magical properties that gets thrown into so many dishes.  Yesterday it was a rich vegetable casserole - onion, garlic, carrot, parsnip, kale, pepper, butternut squash in a tomato sauce and topped with thinly sliced potato.  And flavoured with a generous spoonful of smoked paprika.  

It finds its way into soups, frittatas, risottos, sauces, fish dishes, anywhere I think that smokiness might bring something different.  It's a delight to experiment with, like sprinkling it on haddock pan fried in butter.  

A random word from a dictionary, but one that has played a bigger role in my life that I'd have realised without this prompt.

Footnote : I struggled to find a dictionary on the shelves, having thrown out a vast number of them, and other word-related volumes like Roget, as part of the downsizing exercise when we moved north and the recognition that I'd always go online for what I needed.  But I had kept one, so that shows some prescience!