Vienna’s Hungarian Shakshouka? Discover Letscho—A Pepper Stew with Deep Hungarian Roots (Vegan WFPB Lecsó Recipe)

A story of migration, memory, and simmering peppers—how a humble Hungarian stew became a beloved, kosher-friendly staple in Jewish Vienna, and why its versatile, often meat-free, vegan nature continues to speak to the soul.

Let’s talk Letscho, peppers, Jewish heritage, and a piece of Vienna’s simmering soul

In the canon of Jewish Viennese cuisine—rich with paradox, memory, and improvisation—few dishes embody cultural permeability and preservation as perfectly as Letscho, the pepper stew. Made from wax peppers, tomatoes, and onions—ideally in late summer when they’re at their ripest—this humble stew might seem like rustic peasant fare or a student’s survival meal. And it is. But it’s also more than that. It’s a simmered story of migration, adaptation, resilience—and Yiddishkeit.

Let’s begin with the name. In Hungarian, the dish is spelled lecsó (pronounced letch-oh). This versatile stew of peppers, tomatoes, and onions, often bulked up with sausage, eggs, or rice, is also known by other spellings like lecho in English, or more specifically, Letscho in Vienna, reflecting its widespread journey. The word itself is thought to be onomatopoeic, mimicking the sizzling sound of vegetables cooking in a hot pan, or perhaps derived from the Hungarian verb “lecskedni,” meaning “to slop” or “to pour”—evoking its stew-like consistency. In Hungary, traditional lecsó is usually built on the mild, sweet foundation of Romena peppers (a type of Hungarian wax pepper), but can easily get a kick from a generous dusting of csípős paprika, literally the “biting paprika” that ensures this humble stew, like all good spicy things—think jokes and family stories—, bites at least twice.

But when this dish traveled westward—carried in the satchels, and perhaps memory, of Jewish families moving from the Hungarian plains to Vienna—it underwent more than just culinary transformation. It acquired a new spelling: Letscho, the German-language transcription that often appears in Viennese cookbooks, menus, and communal Jewish recipe collections. That spelling shift—innocuous at first glance—marks the beginning of the dish’s assimilation into a specifically Viennese Jewish culinary vernacular.

Adding another layer to its Viennese identity, Marcia Colman Morton’s The Art of Viennese Cooking—authored by the wife of the celebrated Viennese-born Jewish writer Frederic Morton, whose works evocatively capture Vienna’s cultural essence—offers a unique perspective. Her “Lecso” recipe describes the dish not as a standalone stew, but as something “the Viennese… serve it as they do their sauces: that is, as a garnish for meats,” suggesting its primary role as a flavorful accompaniment to boiled chicken, steak, veal, or frankfurters. Morton’s recipe allows for either butter or oil as the cooking fat, and while she describes its taste as “piquant,” it notably omits paprika from the ingredients list, a curious divergence from its Hungarian roots. And while the Hungarians were busy making their lecsó bite with that csípős paprika, the Viennese were subtly softening theirs. Often, this meant adding a secret spoonful of sugar, because even our vegetable stews here need a certain Süße – a polite sweetness, a gentle nod to the fact that life is hard enough without your lunch also setting your mouth on fire.

This preference for a touch of sweetness isn’t just a Viennese quirk; Jewish food historian Gil Marks himself, in his esteemed Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World, explicitly includes a teaspoon of sugar in his “Hungarian Pepper Ragout” (lecsó), confirming this sweetening as a broader Jewish culinary practice. His recipe also, like some Viennese versions, calls for a bit of tomato purée. Leah Koenig further underscores this adaptability, including a full teaspoon of sugar and even a can of diced tomatoes (alongside tomato paste) in her “Red Pepper and Tomato Ragout,” highlighting the practical and flavor adjustments made in Jewish kitchens, sometimes even incorporating cayenne pepper for a subtle kick. While some traditional and authoritative Hungarian recipes, like Rákóczi’s, can feature a complex sweet-and-sour finish with ingredients like vinegar, mustard, sugar, and lemon juice, the simplicity of a direct sugar addition often characterizes the Viennese (and particularly Jewish Viennese) Letscho, tailoring the flavor to a distinct local palate. In contrast, canonical non-Jewish Viennese sources like Maier-Bruck, and Plachutta, but also Joseph Wechsberg typically omit added sugar in their lecsó recipes, reinforcing that the sweetness often found in Jewish Viennese Letscho is a specific adaptation for a particular palate. It’s a reminder that “Viennese Letscho” wasn’t a monolithic entity, but a delightfully varied spectrum of adaptations, each telling its own story of convenience, taste, and perhaps a dash of culinary rebellion.

As with so much else in the foodways of diaspora, the spelling was not merely phonetic but cultural. It signaled that this was no longer quite lecsó, the meat-heavy, paprika-laden dish of the Hungarian countryside. Yes, before it was “koshered,” lecsó was basically the culinary equivalent of that wild cousin who only shows up for holidays and drinks all your good schnapps. We loved it anyway, and then we fixed it. This was Letscho—a dish filtered through kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) through urban kitchens with limited budgets, and through the linguistic mesh of a German-speaking Jewish community that was always translating between worlds. The same way beigel became Bagel, and barches took on the name challah, so too did lecsó become Letscho: a dish transformed not by forgetting its roots, but by growing new ones.

From Hungarian Hearth to Viennese Table

Traditional lecsó is closely tied to Hungary’s paprika-rich cuisine. Its earliest printed mentions appear in 19th-century Hungarian sources, but the dish likely dates back further, evolving alongside the spread of tomatoes and peppers across Central Europe. By the early 20th century, it was a beloved staple in many Hungarian households: inexpensive, flexible, and comforting.

In the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—an entity defined as much by its shifting borders as its culinary exchanges—lecsó easily crossed into the kitchens of Vienna, especially among Jewish families with roots in Hungary, Slovakia, and Galicia. As the culinary historian András Koerner notes, lecsó was adopted by Jewish communities in the Southeastern parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, including the Jewish inhabitants of Vienna, Galicia, Bohemia, Moravia, and other regions within the Empire. But the lecsó they made was different. Not only in spelling. It had to be.

As Jewish culinary historian Gil Marks writes in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (2010), one of the hallmarks of Jewish cuisine is its capacity to absorb regional dishes and make them kosher. “Judaization” of local foods often meant the elimination of non-kosher elements—particularly pork—and the creative substitution of permissible ingredients. In the case of lecsó, that meant no pork sausage. Canonical Hungarian and Austrian culinary texts showcase their essential components: peppers, tomatoes, and onions, often enriched with fatty, non-kosher meats. Maier-Bruck’s Das Große Sacher Kochbuch, a definitive Austrian culinary reference, acknowledges the dish’s Hungarian origin and its preparation with Speck (bacon) and a roux, served as a vegetable side. Franz Maier-Bruck’s “Lecsó, Letscho” recipe calls for a generous sizzle of Speckwürfel (diced bacon) and even spicy Pfefferschoten (hot peppers) alongside the mild ones. Eduard Plachutta’s recipes for lecsó, though often focusing on sweet bell peppers, still feature bacon as an optional but explicit “tip” for added flavor, and explicitly suggest serving Letscho as a side to pork dishes. Even a more generalized “Hungarian Tomato-Pepper Stew” recipe, frequently found in common cookbooks, often includes a tip “add 80g diced, lightly fried bacon to the stew,” highlighting bacon’s pervasive presence in traditional non-Jewish versions. Joseph Wechsberg’s asimilated Jewish recipe for “Lecsó” in The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire is perhaps the most explicit, beginning with “lard or bacon fat” as the primary cooking medium and calling for both Hungarian and Debreceni sausages, leaving no doubt as to its traditional non-kosher identity. This confirms just how fundamental those forbidden ingredients were to the dish’s local identity outside of Jewish kitchens. Instead, kosher beef salami, poultry sausage, or no meat at all. In many homes, eggs or rice were added for body, or tofu in later decades, as in my mother’s quietly revolutionary vegan version.

In this way, Viennese Jews adapted the dish not only to kosher law but also to the rhythms of urban life. The result was not merely a variation, but a distinctly Jewish Viennese expression—Letscho as an everyday comfort food that maintained its peasant charm while gaining city-dweller subtlety.

Letscho in the Jewish Diaspora Kitchen

Evidence of this adaptation is not just anecdotal. Even celebrated culinary historian Joan Nathan, in her seminal Jewish Cooking in America, spotlights this very phenomenon. She notes that The Haimishe Kitchen, published by the Ladies Auxiliary of Nitra (1977)—a cookbook from a group of Orthodox Jews with roots in Hungary and Slovakia (and incidentally, Nitra is a mere 1.5-hour drive by car from Vienna)—includes four distinct versions of lecsó. These variations, often accompanied by eggs, salami, or rice, truly mirror the way Jewish homes made the dish stretch for Shabbat, breakfast, or a weekday dinner. For instance, their “Breakfast Letcho” offers a quick, single-serving mushroom and celery-infused scramble, with tomato juice as an optional addition. The “Fill-Up-On Letcho” broadens the vegetable base with green squash (zucchini) and more mushrooms and celery, becoming a heartier, half-hour stew finished with stirred-in eggs. A robust “Salami ‘Letcho'” centers the dish around generous amounts of diced kosher beef salami and eggs, transforming it into a substantial main course. Finally, the “Hungarian Rice ‘Letcho'” cleverly turns the vegetable ragout into a full rice pilaf, demonstrating ingenuity in extending a staple into a complete meal without eggs or additional meat. Further emphasizing lecsó’s deep integration into Jewish life, Paola Gavin’s Hazana: Jewish Vegetarian Cooking features a “Hungarian sweet pepper stew (Lecso)” that explicitly notes: “As lecso can be served hot or cold, it is often served for the Sabbath”. This vegetarian version relies solely on olive oil as its cooking fat, a clear departure from the lard or bacon fat of traditional Hungarian versions, showcasing the practical adaptations made for kosher kitchens while also maintaining a focus on fresh ingredients without added sugar or tomato paste. Another prime example comes from Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook, a Lubavitch Women’s Cookbook Publication (New York, 1980s). Their “Lecho” recipe is a masterclass in kosher adaptation. It smartly uses margarine as a pareve fat base and, demonstrating a playful spirit of improvisation, expands the classic pepper-tomato-onion trio with distinctly non-traditional additions like zucchini and mushrooms, while still featuring eggs as a common filler. It shows how Jewish cooks adapted not just by omitting forbidden ingredients, but by creatively incorporating new ones to suit available ingredients or expand the dish.

Directly from Vienna, the Jüdische Tradition Moderne Küche (Jewish Tradition Modern Cuisine) cookbook (1993), published by the WIZO Föderation Wien, offers a “Bulgarisches Letscho” recipe, further confirming its presence in Viennese Jewish kitchens and its regional variations. This specific recipe calls for margarine, a pinch of sugar, and eggs, alongside parsley and garlic, underscoring the typical kosher substitutions and flavor preferences for this versatile stew in a local context. Nathan herself explicitly draws the connection, stating that lecsó’s tomato base is “similar to the Israeli ‘shakshouka,’ used in similar ways,” thereby placing both dishes firmly in a broader Mediterranean lineage of pepper-tomato stews. This global reach is further underscored by Gil Marks’ observation that lecsó is “frequently called lecho in Russia and Israel,” solidifying its place as a truly international Jewish staple that can even be served with matza.Pushing the adaptability of lecsó to even more specific and stringent dietary observance within Jewish tradition, Tamar Ansh’s A Taste of Tradition: Pesach and Beyond, a guide to Non-Gebrochs and Kosher Gluten-Free Cooking, features a “Leitcho” recipe (note the transliterated spelling common in Hasidic Southern Yiddish). This version, relying on olive oil, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, and eggs, perfectly showcases how the dish can be tailored even for the strictures of Passover. It serves as a versatile side dish or, ingeniously, can be baked within an acorn squash to create an elegant, gluten-free entree, demonstrating an elevated culinary approach even under strict conditions. The varied spellings—from Hungarian lecsó to Viennese Letscho, English lecho, and now Ansh’s leitcho—further underscore the dish’s linguistic and culinary journey across cultures and communities.

These cookbooks show that lecsó was more than just food. It was part of a broader culinary network—Jewish, Balkan, Austro-Hungarian, Mediterranean. In fact, lecsó’s closest relatives—ratatouille in Provence, matbucha in Morocco, shakshouka in North Africa and the Levant, and peperonata in Italy—all share the same DNA: slow-simmered peppers and tomatoes, deeply savory, slightly sweet, and infinitely adaptable. Warm or cold, served with bread or grilled meats, peperonata brings the same logic of thrift and flavor to the table. And Vienna—despite its position on the northern edge of Central Europe—has always harbored strong Italian echoes. It is often said that Vienna is Italy’s northernmost city: a joke, perhaps, but one with real historical ballast. For centuries, Trieste belonged to the Habsburgs—from 1382 until the collapse of the empire in 1918—and even Venice was at times under Austrian rule. Italian architects and craftsmen helped shape Vienna’s baroque splendor; Italian was the language of the Habsburg court before German took over. From al fresco palace gardens to elaborate sugar sculptures and string quartets, a distinct Italian imprint remains woven into Vienna’s cultural fabric—and by extension, its cuisine. So the similarities between Letscho and peperonata are not mere coincidence. They are proof of shared culinary intuition, nurtured in overlapping imperial spaces. The Jewish kitchen—especially in Vienna—naturally drew from all these sources, adopting and adapting what could be made kosher, affordable, and comforting.

Yiddishkeit in the Imperial City

To understand how lecsó took root in Vienna, one must understand what Jewish life there looked like. From the 1870s through the 1930s, Vienna became a magnet for Jewish migration—especially from Galicia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary. As historian Steven Beller notes in Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938 (1989), the Jewish community that emerged was extraordinarily diverse: Orthodox Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the East rubbed shoulders with secularized, German-speaking intellectuals. The result was a hybrid identity—neither fully assimilated nor fully traditional.

And food was central to this delicate balancing act. It became a medium through which Jews could honor tradition, express creativity, and find comfort amidst alienation. A dish like Letscho—adapted but recognizable—embodied that tension perfectly.

Even the spaces in which it was and is still often eaten had layered meanings. Consider the Beisl—the typical Viennese tavern. The word likely derives from the Yiddish beis (from Hebrew bayit, “house”) with the Austrian diminutive -l suffix. Thus, Beisl = “little house”—a name with unmistakable Jewish roots, even if most modern Beisls no longer serve kosher food. As linguist Heinz Dieter Pohl notes in Die österreichische Küchensprache (The Austrian Kitchen Language, 2007), the term Beisl and its usage in Vienna is deeply entangled with Jewish linguistic and cultural presence. Since the lean decades after the World War II, Letscho always appears on Beisl menus as a rare vegetable-based option—sometimes with Würstel, sometimes without. But even then, it offers a small, warming trace of Jewish culinary presence. While lecsó was certainly not introduced solely by Jewish communities to Vienna, their role in adapting it into forms free of pork, lard, or other forbidden animal fats was undeniably instrumental, thereby also broadening its appeal as a versatile, often meat-free, option for a wider populace.

A Dish That Spells Memory

The spelling Letscho, then, is not trivial. It reflects not just a phonetic Germanization, but a cultural re-formation. It names a dish shaped by migration, altered by law, and softened by memory. It is lecsó after Vienna has had its way with it—koshered, Germanized, perhaps softened in spice but deepened in feeling. Even today, as Vienna’s Jewish community renews itself—drawing from Israeli, Russian, Bukharan, American, and French roots—the dish lives on. Beyond its profound journey through Jewish culinary history, the inherent versatility of Letscho, rooted in its humble vegetable base, has allowed it to continuously adapt to other significant dietary shifts and cultural movements. Peter Peter’s comprehensive Kulturgeschichte der österreichischen Küche (Cultural History of Austrian Cuisine) offers a striking modern example of this ongoing evolution. Within its pages, a “Letscho” recipe by Erich Siekovics (2009) is explicitly identified as a “Pannonians veganer Beitrag zur österreichischen Küche” (Pannonian vegan contribution to Austrian cuisine). This minimalist version, relying simply on vegetable oil, onions, peppers, and tomatoes, showcases a contemporary, non-Jewish adaptation that shares the core plant-based purity of many Jewish lecsó variations, albeit driven by a different cultural and dietary philosophy. It may now be vegan, or contain tofu instead of egg, or be topped with plant-based yoghurt or fermented cashew cream. But it still whispers its origin story: Hungarian, Jewish, Viennese. And it still has cousins in Bologna, Tunis, Marrakesh, and Marseille.

Eat Your History

So the next time you make a pot of lecsó, think beyond the vegetables. Think of the Galician grandmother who stirred hers with a wooden spoon near the Karmelitermarkt on Mazzesinsel (“matzo island”) in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district. Think of the kosher butcher near the Gürtel, maybe close to Frederic Morton’s childhood home, who sold salami for the Friday-night version. Think of the student reheating leftovers in a trendy Neubau walk-up. Think of the cook who remembered to call it Letscho, not lecsó, not just because they spoke German, but because they belonged to a culture that knew how to take the old, the foreign, the forbidden, and make it home. Let your Letscho be not just a stew but a statement: of belonging, of memory, of joyful survival. And of the profound Jewish truth that sometimes, the holiest things happen not in the synagogue but in the kitchen—one bubbling pot of peppers at a time.