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Eggs and Chopped Potatoes
Take ten or twelve cold boiled potatoes, chop them fine, heat a spider very hot and put in a piece of butter the size of an egg; add the potatoes, salt a little, and stir frequently. When well heated through, turn in five eggs beaten very light, stir rapidly or five or six minutes, and serve on a hot platter.
A plain hash-and-eggs of the kind that used up Sunday's boiled potatoes on Monday morning. Two things in the wording need translating, and one timing needs shortening.
- A spider is a skilletNineteenth-century spiders were cast-iron frying pans, originally with three short legs for standing over coals. Use a heavy 10- or 12-inch cast-iron or other thick-bottomed skillet; the mass is what lets the potatoes brown instead of steam.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 tablespoons, sometimes reckoned as much as 3. With this quantity of potato, err on the generous side or the hash will stick.
- Ten or twelve potatoesPotatoes of the period were often smaller than today's. Figure about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds of cooked potato, which is four or five medium russets or Yukon Golds today, not twelve.
- Boil them the day beforeThe recipe says cold boiled deliberately. Warm, freshly boiled potatoes chop into paste; chilled ones hold their crumb and take colour.
- The five or six minutes is for the potatoes, not the eggsFive or six minutes is a long time for eggs -- The recipe puts that timing after the eggs go in, but five beaten eggs stirred in a hot pan will set quickly, and can dry out. Get the potatoes hot and browned first, then add the eggs and stir only until they just hold together.
- Season past the saltBlack pepper and a handful of chopped parsley or scallion tops suit this dish, though the recipe calls for none. Salt the potatoes while they heat rather than after the eggs go in.
- YieldServes four generously, or five or six as part of a larger breakfast. Serve it directly from the pan onto a warmed platter, as directed, since it cools fast.
This is thrift cookery of the plainest sort: cold potatoes were the standing leftover of every household that boiled them by the potful, and breakfast was where they went. Recipes of this type fill the morning chapters of late nineteenth-century American household books, alongside hashed beef and fried mush, all built on the same principle of reheating yesterday's starch in a hot iron pan with a little butter and binding it with egg. The spider named here is worth noticing as a period marker; the legged version was being displaced by flat-bottomed skillets made for cast-iron cookstoves, but the old name stuck to the new pan and turns up in American cookbooks long after the legs were gone.