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Hashed Brown Potatoes
Cut three large raw potatoes into very small dice, season with salt and pepper, melt two tablespoons of butter in a frying pan, when hot add potatoes, and stir until they are well heated and mixed with the butter. Then push the potatoes to one side the pan and keep over a moderate fire without stirring for fifteen or twenty minutes. The potatoes should form together in the shape of an omelet. Chopped parsley may be added just before turning out if desired.
— Mrs. John E. Newkirk
A raw-potato hash, not the leftover-boiled kind, which changes the timing more than the wording lets on. The whole dish hangs on the potatoes being cut small enough to cook through before the underside browns.
- Dice size is the hingeRaw potato needs to be cut to about a quarter inch or smaller or the outside will be a dark crust over a hard centre. Cut them just before cooking and pat dry; surface water steams rather than browns.
- "Push to one side the pan"This most likely means gathering the potatoes into a single mass on one half of the skillet rather than moving them off the heat, so the cake sets against the pan bottom.
- Moderate fireOn a gas or electric hob this is medium-low. Fifteen to twenty minutes at higher heat will scorch the crust well before the interior is tender.
- Two tablespoons of butter is leanButter alone browns fast at this length of cooking. A mix of butter and a neutral oil, or clarified butter, holds up better over twenty minutes without the milk solids burning.
- Pan choiceA well-seasoned cast iron or other heavy pan gives the cake something to release from; a thin pan is more likely to scorch unevenly over this length of cooking.
- Turning outSlide the cake onto a plate crust-side up, or invert the pan over a plate. The recipe says only "turning out" and does not call for browning a second side.
- YieldThree large potatoes and one pan make a side dish for three or four, or breakfast for two.
The "hash" in hashed browns is chopped cooked potato, and the full name "hashed brown potatoes" turns up on American hotel and restaurant menus and in cookbooks of the later nineteenth century before it was clipped. What Mrs. Newkirk gives here is the version that starts from raw potato and cooks slowly into a single cake, which in form is closer to a Swiss rösti than to a scramble of scraps. Community cookbooks like this one, assembled from the contributed receipts of local households, are where such everyday cooking got written down at all.