Barcsz

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Barcsz (serves 8)
Preparation time	2 days
Cooking time	2-3 hours
Contributed by	SquidDNA
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(Family recipe variant -- served at Easter)

Ingredients

• 4 lbs polish sausage
• ~1/2 cup of cream
• ~3/4 cup of vinegar?
• ~1/2 cup of "prepared horseradish" (NOT horseradish sauce-- it should mainly be clumpy *vegetable matter, not a smooth creamy paste.)
• salt
• pepper
• 1 egg
• More eggs
• a loaf of bread

Begin two days prior to serving-- it doesn't take that long to prepare, the soup just needs to sit in the fridge awhile to develop the flavor.

Preparation

1. Loosely place sausage in a pot large enough to hold foot-long lengths diagonally. (Cut if grossly necessary, as with peices that come two feet long, bent in half.) 4 lbs of sausage and a gallon and a half of water should be fine.
2. Bring to a boil, then simmer for a half hour.
3. Poke lots of holes in the sausage (say every inch on two or three sides of the sausage) and simmer for another half hour. It's best if you can do this without taking the sausage out.
4. Does it look like simmering for another half hour isn't going to get any more of the juice out? If so, remove the sausage and set aside. Skim off as much molten fat as you want.
5. This is the tricky part which requires a little experience with the dish. Continuing to simmer, add a bunch of cream. The soup should become a muddled white, and the ladle or spoon should not be visible past a half inch to an inch (you can always add more later, but I suppose you don't want to add too much.)
6. Add horseradish.
7. Next, slowly add vinegar until the cream begins to clump / curdle. There's now some texture to the appearance of the soup, yes? Add a little bit of salt and pepper. A pinch, a dash, whatever. Taste-- it should be rich with cream and sour. If it's right, tasting it should kick your tongue with the sweetness of the cream and the saltiness of the sausage broth right before the vinegar and horseradish make the sides of your tongue tingle. If you do not get the warm tingling on the sides of your tongue, you need more vinegar and horseradish. Of course, this will make the soup start to clear up, so add more cream back.
8. Add a smushed up raw egg or two-- just a little bit of egg drop. You can scramble it in a bowl or however you're most comfortable.
9. Cut up the sausage into peices an inch or two long and add it back. Simmer for another half hour. Hard boil three eggs in the meantime.
10. Letting the soup cool to warm, peel the eggs, slice them, and add to the soup.
11. Refrigerate for a day or two. Cut slices of bread in half and leave in a warm place to become stale. (We've always used white bread, but other types should be fine. I used some sourdough wheat.)
12. Hard boil a dozen more eggs (easter eggs work fine and add some fun color to the soup if the dye has soaked in) while reheating the soup.
13. Add a few peices of stale bread to the bowl and ladle some soup in. Cracks, peel, and slice your own egg, adding it to your soup just before you eat.

This is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. You're never really supposed to make it any time but Easter, but this may be as much a health precaution as anything. Kudos to anyone that even tries to make it, given the highly qualitative nature of the recipe.