Roy Atwell
ROAST BEEF HASH WITH GREEN PEPPERS
A cold roast of beef chopped up fine with several onions, according to how fond you are of these, two green peppers and half a dozen freshly boiled potatoes. Chop all together and bake in a moderate oven. A little melted butter and Worcestershire sauce, poured over it while baking, help to make this the most wonderful dish in the world. Very truly yours,
A cold-roast hash with no quantities beyond "a cold roast," no dish size and no baking time. The bones of it are sound; what it needs is a ratio and a pan that will give you a crust.
- The stray heading"Sautéd Fillets of Beef" appears to be a title belonging to another recipe, carried over onto this page; nothing in the text that follows corresponds to it. The recipe you are reading is the hash alone.
- Working ratioFor a 9-inch skillet or shallow baking dish, figure about 1 lb cooked beef, 6 boiled potatoes (roughly 1 1/2 lb) and the two peppers; the recipe leaves the onions to taste ("several ... according to how fond you are of these"), so from one or two upward. That serves four.
- Moderate oven350F. Give it 30 to 40 minutes uncovered, long enough for the top to brown and the edges to catch.
- Green peppersHere this means an ordinary unripe bell pepper, not a chile. Sweat them with the onion first, since raw pepper will not soften much in a baked hash.
- Chop, do not processHand-chopped or coarsely ground beef holds its texture. A food processor turns cold roast into paste and the dish loses the loose, crumbly character that makes hash worth eating.
- PotatoesBoil them the day before if you can and chill them. Warm, freshly boiled potatoes shed starch and go gluey when chopped in with the meat.
- Butter and WorcestershireTwo or three tablespoons melted butter and a tablespoon of Worcestershire is about right. Pour it on at the start rather than partway through, and add a little beef stock if the mixture looks dry; cold roast beef, once trimmed, is fairly lean.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is named. Taste and season the mixture before it goes in the oven, remembering the Worcestershire brings salt with it.
This comes from Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916), a collection of dishes solicited from stage performers of the day and printed with their sign-offs intact, which is why the page ends mid-courtesy with "Very truly yours." Roy Atwell was a comic actor best remembered for a stammering, word-tangling delivery, and the contributions in this book are less culinary documents than autographs with food attached: brief, unmeasured, endorsed in the first person. The dish itself is the standard American answer to a Sunday roast, hash made from what the joint left behind, here baked rather than fried. The Worcestershire is a savory shortcut of the kind period recipes often reach for, and green peppers, well established in American cookery by then, round out the mixture.