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Hash
Three-eighths cup of cooked meat cut into cubes, one-fourth cup of cold boiled potatoes cut into cubes; cook one-fourth teaspoon of fat and one-half teaspoon of flour in a stewpan until brown, add one-half cup of cold stock or water and season with a teaspoon of onion juice and pepper and salt. When this gravy is the proper consistency then turn in the cubes of meat and the potatoes, and when thoroughly heated serve with toasted crackers or bread, with parsley as garnish.
A single portion of leftover meat in brown gravy, written in the fussy fractional style of turn-of-the-century cookery school teaching. The quantities are small and one of them is almost certainly a misprint.
- YieldThree-eighths cup of meat and a quarter cup of potato is one modest serving, likely intended as an invalid's or breakfast portion. Multiply by four for a family and keep the proportions: roughly three parts meat to two parts potato.
- The roux is under-measuredA quarter teaspoon of fat and half a teaspoon of flour will not thicken half a cup of liquid to any "proper consistency." For half a cup of stock use about 2 teaspoons each of fat and flour; the original figures look like a typesetting error or a reduction from a larger master recipe.
- Brown the flour properlyThis is a brown sauce, not a white one. Cook the fat and flour over medium heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a walnut shell, three to five minutes. Stop short of black, which turns bitter and loses thickening power.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a wedge in a garlic press. A teaspoon is a lot of raw onion flavour for this volume; half is enough if the onion is sharp.
- StewpanAny small heavy saucepan. A stewpan generally meant a straight-sided pan with a lid, used on the range top rather than in the oven.
- Do not boil the meat againThe meat is already cooked. Add it at the end and heat it through, two or three minutes at a bare simmer, or it goes stringy and dry. This is the difference between good hash and grey hash.
- Toasted crackersPeriod recipes usually mean plain soda or water crackers, split and dried in the oven until crisp. Any thin unsweetened cracker or a slice of dry toast serves the same purpose, which is to soak up gravy.
This is hash in its household-economy sense: the Sunday roast reappearing on Tuesday, bound with a little brown gravy so that a few ounces of meat make a meal. The word comes from the French hacher, to chop, and the dish is old enough that the verb and the noun have long since parted company in English. What marks this version as belonging to its era is not the idea but the arithmetic — three-eighths of a cup, one-fourth teaspoon — which reflects the influence of the American cooking schools of the 1880s and 1890s, where measured cups and spoons replaced the handful and the lump and recipes were increasingly written as scalable formulas. The same period explains the onion juice: strained onion gave flavour without visible pieces, and it appears often in cookbooks of this generation before largely falling out of use.