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FALL PICNICS
Broiled prairie chicken; fish chowder; clam chowder; clams roasted or fried; beef omelet; cold veal roast; sardines; cold roast chicken; pot of pork and beans; rusk, Minnesota rolls, Boston brown bread; potatoes, Irish or sweet, roasted in ashes; egg sandwiches (hard-boiled eggs, sliced, sprinkled with pepper and salt, and put between buttered bread); mangoes; piccalilli; Chili sauce; quince marmalade; baked apples; musk and nutmeg-melon; crab apple jelly; grape jelly; black, orange, velvet, sponge, and three-ply cake; combination pie.
Mother's hash does n't taste of soap grease, rancid butter, spoiled cheese, raw flour, boarding-house skillets, hotel coffee, garden garlics, bologna sausage, or cayenne pepper; neither is it stewed and simmered and stewed, but is made so nicely, seasoned so delicately, and heated through so quickly, that the only trouble is, "there is never enough to go round." Cold meat of any kind will do, but corned beef is best; always remove all surplus fat and bits of gristle, season with salt and pepper, chop fine, and to one-third of meat add two-thirds of chopped cold boiled potato, and one onion chopped very fine; place in the dripping-pan, dredge with a little flour, and pour in at the side of the pan enough water to come up level with the hash, place in oven, and do not stir; when the flour is a light-brown, and has formed a sort of crust, take out, add a lump of butter, stir it through several times, and you will have a delicious hash. Or, by cooking longer, it may be made of cold raw potatoes, which peel, slice, and let lie in salt and water a half hour before chopping. If of meat and potatoes, always use the proportions given above, and before chopping, seasen with pepper and salt, and a chopped onion if you like (if onions are not to be had, take them out of pickle jar), place in hot skillet with just enough water to moisten, add a little butter or some nice beef drippings, stir often until warmed through, cover and let stand on a moderately hot part of the stove fifteen minutes. When ready to dish, run the knife under and fold as you would an omelet, and serve hot with tomato catsup. In making hash meats may be combined if there is not enough of a kind. Do not make hash or any other dish greasy. It is a mistaken idea to think that fat and butter in large quantities are necessary to good cooking. Butter and oils may be melted without changing their nature, but when cooked they become much more indigestible and injurious to weak stomachs.
The page opens as a picnic bill of fare and then turns, without warning, into a full working recipe for hash — two of them, in fact, an oven version and a skillet version. The list at the top is a shopping guide; the instructions begin at "Cold meat of any kind will do."
- The ratio is the recipeOne-third chopped cooked meat to two-thirds chopped cold boiled potato, plus one finely chopped onion. Corned beef is named as best; unseasoned roast beef or veal will need noticeably more salt.
- Do not stir the oven versionThe flour dredge and the water poured in at the side of the pan are what build the browned crust on top. Stirring before that crust sets gives you wet mince. Only after it colours does the butter go in and get stirred through.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, for roughly 30-40 minutes will set the crust; hotter and the shallow layer dries before it browns evenly.
- Dripping-panA shallow rectangular roasting pan, the one that sat under a roast. A modern quarter-sheet pan or a 9x13 baking dish does the same job. Keep the hash in a shallow layer, since the water is only meant to come up level with it.
- Raw potato variantThe half hour in salt water draws out surface starch and helps keep the slices from greying. The recipe says only that this version wants longer cooking; peel, slice and soak before chopping, as directed.
- "Take them out of pickle jar"Mixed pickles of the period often included small pickled onions alongside the cucumbers. Drained cocktail onions or a spoonful of good pickle relish is the equivalent; rinse them if the vinegar is sharp.
- Mangoes on the bill of fareNot the tropical fruit. In American household books of this period a "mango" is a stuffed pickle, usually a sweet pepper or a small melon hollowed and packed with spiced cabbage and mustard seed.
- Prairie chickenThe greater prairie chicken was ordinary market game in 1877 and is now a protected species across most of its former range, with the Attwater's subspecies federally endangered. Any modern version of that first line means farmed quail, pheasant or Cornish hen.
- YieldThe proportions scale to whatever leftovers you have; the recipe gives no quantities or yield, only the one-to-two ratio.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio, in 1877, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox from contributions gathered through the ladies of the First Congregational Church of Marysville, whose Centennial Buckeye Cook Book of 1876 was the parent volume, and its bills of fare are one of the clearest windows in the book onto how a Midwestern household actually ate. A fall picnic here is not a basket of sandwiches but a table: chowders, a pot of baked beans, three kinds of bread, five kinds of cake, and the whole pickle-and-jelly shelf emptied out, because the point of an autumn outing was to show what the summer's putting-up had produced. That hash should be spliced onto the end of a picnic menu is characteristic of the book's editing, which was frankly haphazard ut is the more revealing text. It is a defence of leftovers written with real heat, taking aim at boarding-house cooking and its soap grease and rancid butter, and it ends on a piece of period dietary science: that fats are wholesome melted but turn "indigestible and injurious to weak stomachs" once cooked. That belief, common in nineteenth-century domestic writing, is not how we would put it now, but the practical advice it produced — do not make hash greasy — has held up better than the theory behind it.