Home › The Principles of Cookery › Hash, Common
Hash, Common
Cut a pound of mutton into thin slices. Season with salt and pepper, and dredge a little flour over them. Stew a finely-minced onion in half a pint of stock or water for thirty minutes. Flavour it with a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Put in the pieces of mutton, stew gently for two or three minutes, till the flour has thickened the sauce and lost its raw taste, serve on a hot dish, and garnish with toasted sippets. Probable cost, 2d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for three persons.
A leftovers dish from a book written for households that roasted a joint on Sunday and expected it to keep working through the week. The whole method hinges on the meat being already cooked.
- Start with cold roast meatThe costing line — "exclusive of the cold meat" — makes clear this is yesterday's roast, not raw mutton. Raw slices stewed for two or three minutes would be inedible. Use a pound of cold roast lamb or mutton, sliced thin across the grain.
- The two- to three-minute stew is the pointThe meat is only being heated through and glazed with sauce. Longer simmering squeezes cooked mutton dry and stringy, which is why the onion gets its full thirty minutes first and the meat goes in last.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1¼ US cups of stock. Lamb or beef stock is closer to the original intent than chicken.
- Flour"Dredge a little flour" means a light dusting over the slices, perhaps 2 teaspoons total; it thickens the sauce as the meat warms. If the sauce stays thin, mash a little softened butter with flour and stir it in rather than adding dry flour at the end.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, once as common as bottled sauce is now, and still sold by some specialist grocers. In its place use a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, or half soy sauce and half mushroom soaking liquid.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast or fried bread, set round the edge of the dish. They are there to soak up the sauce and are worth making rather than skipping.
- SeasoningCold roast meat is already seasoned, and mushroom ketchup and stock both carry salt. Season the slices lightly and taste the sauce before adding more.
- YieldThree servings as written, and thin at that by modern standards — treat it as a supper dish with potatoes or rice, not a main course on its own.
Hash in the Victorian sense was not the chopped-and-fried American breakfast dish; it meant cold cooked meat sliced and rewarmed in a made sauce, and cookery books of the period carry many variations — hashed mutton, hashed venison, hash with wine, hash with capers. This one is labelled "common" apparently because it uses the cheapest possible flavourings: an onion, water in place of stock if need be, and a spoonful of bottled mushroom ketchup. The costing of twopence fits the book's pitch to a household running on a fixed weekly allowance, where the Sunday joint was expected to reappear on Monday and Tuesday in a form that did not look like the same meat twice. Mushroom ketchup predates tomato ketchup in Britain by a long way, and was a common cupboard sauce for this kind of thrifty rescue work.