This cucumber salad version is different than I find in any of my cookbooks, but it’s the one I grew up with and simply love the most. Many recipes add sour cream or onions which is fine, but when you have this simply incredibly crispy, fresh, sweet, sour side next to the rich egg dumplings swimming in paprikas gravy with chicken, it’s blow your socks off perfectly delicious.

Here’s the secret:  Use very young firm cucumbers, or the hot house kind with no seeds. Big fat white seeds floating around in this dish is awful and fishing them out is impossible.

Ingredients are:

Firm cucumbers 3 hot house or 6 garden
Salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 lemon juice
2 or 3 fresh garlic cloves minced
Hungarian paprika

Slice the cucumbers very very thin.
Add about 1/8 cup salt toss and let sit for at least an hour to sweat out the juice and brine the cucumbers.
Rinse very well, I usually let them sit in the colander to drain at this point.
In a bowl add the crushed garlic, lemon juice and sugar.
Toss the cucumbers back in and let sit for about 30min.

Serve in side bowls with paprika sprinkled on top. You’ll never want to serve Chicken Paprikas without this again.