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Hash, Cold Beef or Mutton
Cut one pound of cold meat into neat slices, free from skin and gristle. Put a large onion, finely minced, into a saucepan, and with it two ounces of butter and a table-spoonful of flour. Stir over the fire until the ingredients are smoothly mixed and brown, being careful that they do not burn. Add gradually half a pint of good stock or water, and the bones and trimmings, and simmer gently until the sauce is as thick as cream. Strain it, return to the fire, put in the pieces of meat, and let them remain until they are quite hot, but the sauce must not boil after the meat is added, or the latter will be hard. A hash may be varied by the addition of finely-minced green pickles, a dozen stewed mushrooms, or half a dozen tomatoes, but these should be added to the sauce before the meat is put in, so that there will be no necessity for its remaining in the gravy too long. Serve with toasted sippets round the dish. Time, about an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the meat. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A Victorian brown-sauce hash, built to make Monday's cold joint worth eating. The method is sound and needs little more than unit conversion and a clear eye on the one rule the text itself flags.
- The hinge: never boil the meatThe meat is already cooked; it is being reheated in the sauce, not stewed. Hold the pan below a simmer until the slices are hot through, which takes only a few minutes. Boiling squeezes the fibres and gives you the leather the original warns against.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or a scant 1 1/4 US cups. With 2 oz butter and a tablespoon of flour that is a loose roux, which is intentional — you want a pouring sauce the thickness of cream, not a gravy that sets.
- Brown the roux properlyThe onion, butter and flour want steady medium heat and constant stirring until the flour smells nutty and turns the colour of a walnut shell. This is where all the flavour comes from, and it is also where it is easiest to go wrong: scorched flour turns the whole sauce bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Bones and trimmingsSimmering the bones in the sauce is doing the work of stock, so use them if you have them. If your cold meat came off a boneless joint, use a well-flavoured beef or lamb stock rather than water, and give the sauce time to reduce and concentrate until it is as thick as cream.
- Strain, then returnStraining removes the onion and bone debris and leaves the smooth sauce the original asks for.
- SippetsTriangles of bread toasted or fried in dripping and stood around the rim of the dish. Crusts trimmed, cut on the diagonal; they go on at the last second or they soften.
- The variationsA dozen stewed mushrooms means mushrooms cooked separately in butter beforehand, not raw ones dropped in. Half a dozen tomatoes will thin and sharpen the sauce considerably — peel and seed them, and let the sauce reduce again before the meat goes in.
- Time and yieldThe stated hour is nearly all sauce-making and simmering; active work is perhaps 15 minutes. One pound of cooked meat serves two or three, as stated, which by modern portioning is generous for two with potatoes.
Hash in the English kitchen was generally a re-heat dish rather than the chopped-and-fried American kind: neat slices of yesterday's joint warmed in a made sauce, usually distinct from mince or rissoles, which used the scraps. Cassell's treats it as an alphabetical entry, "Hash, Cold Beef or Mutton," and the method demonstrates the brown roux and the rule that cooked meat must not be re-boiled. The economics are stated plainly: sixpence for the sauce, exclusive of the meat. Large Sunday joints left remains to be dealt with on Monday and Tuesday in Victorian middle-class houses, and the cookery books of the period devote whole chapters to the problem. The sippets are older still, and are often traced to a medieval and early-modern habit of setting sops of bread around or beneath a dish of gravy, surviving here as garnish long after they had stopped being the main way of eating the sauce.