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Lentil and Dried Olive Hash
2 1/2 cups stewed lentils 2 potatoes 1 large onion 3/4 cup tomato 1/4 cup vegetable oil Dried olives sufficient to make 3/4 cup when chopped To freshen the olives, soak them in cold water, then bring to the boiling point and pour off the water. It may be necessary to do this twice. Then cut up the olives and stone them. Boil the potatoes or use left-over boiled potatoes. Chop the onion, and cook it in the oil till it begins to turn yellow. Chop all the ingredients together, put into an oiled pan, and bake till brown.
A meatless hash that leans on salt-cured olives for its savour, so the soaking step is the one that decides whether the dish is edible or inedibly salty.
- Dried olivesThese are salt-cured or sun-dried black olives, wrinkled and very salty, sold today as oil-cured, Moroccan or Thassos olives. The soak-and-boil described is a desalting step; taste one after each change of water and repeat until the salt is pleasant rather than sharp.
- Stone them firstStoning -- pitting is easier before chopping, though the recipe does it the other way round. The stones of dried olives cling, so expect to work them out by hand, and allow rather more than 3/4 cup of whole olives, since the stones take up part of the volume.
- SaltNo salt is listed anywhere in the recipe, presumably because the olives supply it. Season only at the end, after the olives are in, or the dish may be over-salted.
- Stewed lentilsAbout 1 cup of dry brown or green lentils, simmered until tender and well drained, gives the 2 1/2 cups called for. Drain them properly; a wet mixture will steam rather than brown.
- TomatoThree-quarters of a cup of tomato; canned pulp or crushed tomatoes, or fresh chopped tomato, would both suit, rather than tomato paste. It adds much of the moisture.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. A moderate to moderately hot oven will brown the top; go by colour rather than the clock, and pressing the mixture into a shallow pan gives more crust.
- Chopping togetherChop rather than mash. The interest of a hash is in distinguishable bits of potato, onion and olive, so a food processor is the wrong tool here.
- YieldProbably enough for four as a main dish, or six as a side.
Salt-dried black olives travelled well and kept for months, which made them a pantry staple around the Mediterranean and, through immigrant kitchens, in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century. The meatless combination here -- oil browned in a pan with lentils, potato and onion, no meat, no butter, no stock -- may belong to the vegetarian and reform-diet cookery current in the decades either side of 1900, though the recipe itself says nothing of its origins. The technique is the old one of the hash: cooked leftovers chopped, bound with something moist, and browned to give the crust that makes a second-day dish worth eating.