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Hash, Superior
Peel two dozen button-onions, dredge them with flour, and fry them with two ounces of butter till they are brightly browned. Pour over them half a pint of good broth, add a little salt and pepper, and a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, and either a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup or a few stewed mushrooms, and simmer gently until the onions are quite tender. Pour the gravy over the slices of meat, and let them remain until required. Put the contents of the dish into a saucepan, and let them get as hot as possible without boiling. Serve immediately. A glass of claret or port is an improvement. Time, an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast beef, mutton or lamb: build a proper onion gravy first, then warm the sliced meat through in it without letting it boil. The gravy is the dish; the meat is leftovers.
- The hinge: never let it boilAlready-cooked meat that boils in gravy turns grey and stringy in a minute or two. Bring the pan to the point where steam rises and the surface just trembles, hold it there until the slices are hot through, and serve at once.
- Reheat properly, though"As hot as possible without boiling" means holding the pan just short of a boil, comfortably above the 165F you want for reheating cooked meat. Do not let the assembled dish sit at room temperature for hours as the original implies; refrigerate the meat and gravy separately and combine when you are ready to heat.
- Button onionsThese are pearl or small pickling onions, about an inch across. Two dozen is roughly 12 oz. Frozen peeled pearl onions work; thaw and pat dry before flouring or they will steam rather than brown.
- Half a pint of brothImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 cups of good beef or lamb stock. Unsalted stock is safer here since the gravy reduces while the onions soften.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, salty, black mushroom-and-spice liquor, not the tomato sauce the word suggests now. It is still sold by British specialists; a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce or a teaspoon of soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquid gives a comparable savoury depth.
- A glass of claret or portA Victorian wine glass is small, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz. Add it with the broth so the alcohol cooks off while the onions simmer, rather than at the end.
- TimingThe hour covers frying and simmering the onions until tender, perhaps 25-35 minutes of actual stewing depending on their size. Warming the meat takes only a few minutes after that.
- Yield and servingThree or four servings. The recipe does not say how much cold meat to use; this quantity of gravy will carry roughly a pound of sliced meat. Serve over mashed potato, buttered toast or plain boiled rice to catch the gravy.
This hash is titled "superior" presumably to set it apart from plain reheated leftovers, in households where a large joint roasted on Sunday had to reappear through the week. The economy is explicit in the entry itself: sixpence, "exclusive of the cold meat" — the meat is assumed already paid for. What lifts it is the treatment of the onions, browned in butter and stewed in broth in the manner of a French ragout garnish, plus the trio of Victorian flavour props: lemon juice, mushroom ketchup and a glass of fortified or red wine. Mushroom ketchup, a spiced liquor pressed from salted mushrooms, was a standard bottled savoury seasoning in nineteenth-century English kitchens before tomato ketchup took over the name.