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Hashed Browned Potatoes
Sprinkle 2 1/2 cups cold boiled potato cubes with salt and white pepper to suit taste. Melt 1 1/2 tablespoons Crisco; add 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 cup brown stock. Cook 5 minutes; add potato cubes; cook 10 minutes, stirring, without breaking potatoes. Melt 1 tablespoon Crisco in another frying pan. When brown, turn in potatoes, spread evenly, and cook 10 minutes; fold like an omelet, and serve hot.
This is not the dry, crisp diner hash brown but an older style in which the cubes are bound with a little brown gravy and turned out folded like an omelet. A few notes before you start.
- The hinge: cold, dry potatoesBoil the potatoes a day ahead, cool them uncovered in the refrigerator, and cube them dry. Warm or damp potatoes shed starch and steam, and the cubes will collapse into mash the moment you stir them.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book was published by its maker to sell it. Any neutral fat works; butter or a butter-and-oil mix gives better flavour and browns more readily, and bacon fat or drippings would also suit the dish.
- Brown stockA dark, well-reduced beef or veal stock. A good low-sodium beef broth is the practical substitute. If your stock or broth is salted, go easy on the salt the recipe puts on the cubes.
- The roux is a binder, not a sauceOne tablespoon flour to half a cup stock makes a thin gravy that coats the cubes and glues them into a cake. Cook it the full five minutes so the flour loses its raw taste, and resist adding more liquid.
- Stirring without breakingUse a wide flexible spatula and lift and fold rather than stir. Ten minutes of agitation is a long time for cooked potato; a floury baking potato will not survive it. Use a waxy or all-purpose potato such as Yukon Gold.
- The panAn 8- or 9-inch heavy skillet, well seasoned or nonstick. Get the second pan and its fat properly hot before the potatoes go in, spread them once, then leave them alone for the full ten minutes so a crust forms; that crust is what allows the fold.
- HeatMedium to medium-high. Lower and the cake never sets; higher and the flour in the gravy scorches before the underside browns.
- YieldTwo and a half cups of cubes is about 1 lb of potatoes, serving two as a breakfast dish or three as a side.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which came on the market in 1911; the recipes call for the shortening by name, which is why a plain potato dish specifies a branded fat down to the half tablespoon. The dish itself belongs to an older hotel-and-boarding-house tradition of hashed potatoes, in which yesterday's boiled potatoes were revived with a little stock and gravy rather than simply fried dry.