Home › The Principles of Cookery › Smoked Meat, Hash Of
Smoked Meat, Hash Of
Take some carrots, and cut them into long strips or little dice; stew them till quite soft in broth with salt and butter. Brown a little flour in butter, and drain the broth from the carrots into it. Add to the preparation a little vinegar, sugar, and pepper; stir and boil it till it forms a creamy sauce. Take remains of smoked meat, and cut it into small dice or slces; add these to the carrot, pour in the sauce, stir the hash well, and let it stew for a quarter of an hour. If liked, a minced onion may be stewed with the carrots. This dish should be served with potatoes or klosse.
A leftovers dish built on a sweet-sour roux sauce, German in character despite the English book. The whole thing hinges on salt: smoked meat carries plenty, so season the sauce only at the end.
- Smoked meatThe recipe assumes cooked leftovers — smoked ham, gammon, smoked pork loin or shoulder, or a smoked sausage such as kielbasa. Raw bacon or raw smoked pork belly is not what is meant; use something already cooked, since the fifteen-minute stew is only a reheat.
- SaltThe recipe does salt the carrots as they stew, but keep it light. Cured smoked pork will salt the finished sauce on its own, and a reduced roux sauce concentrates whatever is already there.
- QuantitiesNone are given here. For four people: about 1 lb carrots, 1 lb diced cooked smoked meat, 1 pint broth, and a roux of 1 oz butter to 1 oz flour.
- Browning the flour"Brown a little flour in butter" means a blond-to-nut-brown roux, cooked a few minutes over moderate heat until it smells toasted. Add the hot carrot broth off the heat and whisk to avoid lumps.
- Vinegar and sugarStart with a tablespoon of wine or cider vinegar and a teaspoon of sugar, then adjust. The sauce should read sweet-sour but not sharp; the smoke and the sugar have to balance.
- BrothAny light stock works, but the liquid from simmering a ham or gammon joint is ideal — reduce it or dilute it if it tastes very salty.
- KlösseGerman potato or bread dumplings, boiled in salted water. Any plain dumpling, boiled potatoes or buttered noodles will carry the sauce equally well.
- TimingA quarter-hour stew is fine here because the meat is already cooked and the carrots already soft. Longer only breaks the carrots down and thickens the sauce past the "creamy" stage.
Cassell's compiled its entries from across Europe, and this one looks German or Austrian in character: the browned-butter roux, the vinegar-and-sugar finish, and above all the direction to serve with Klösse, the boiled potato or bread dumplings of southern Germany and Bohemia. Sweet-sour carrots with smoked pork belong to a wider Central European habit of setting cured meat against something sharp and something sweet, and the dish exists for the ordinary reason that a smoked ham or shoulder outlasts the meal it was bought for. "Hash" in this period simply means meat cut small and reheated in a sauce, with no implication of frying or of the American potato hash.