If you are a Midwesterner, you may have grown up having something called “goulash.” For me it looked suspiciously like chili, maybe a bit soupier and a bit blander, and it definitely involved some form of pasta, likely elbow macaroni. Outside the Midwest, the same dish, or something very similar, appears, but with different names. Along the East Coast, American chop suey appears to be a similar casserole, if not the same, as is “glop.” Several years ago, my travels took me to Budapest, Hungary, where goulash is the national dish. I sat down in a café with a short menu that appeared dedicated to it, but when my order arrived, I thought, “What the heck is this?” It amounted to a plate of tender chunks of beef swimming in a paprika-heavy gravy with bits of potatoes and carrots. Delicious, but a far cry from what my mother was peddling. …