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Some Kitchen Kinks: Hash
Vegetable Hash.-Hash may be made with one or many cooked vegetables, the vegetable or vegetables being used alone or combined with meat or fish. Potato is the most useful vegetable for a hash, as it combines well with the animal food or with other vegetables.
The conditions essential to a good hash are that the vegetables shall be cut fairly fine, but not so fine that the pieces shall lose their shape or stick together-that is, the particles should drop apart readily when shaken on a fork. Each vegetable must be cut up separately, then all be mixed. The vegetables, or vegetable, and meat or fish must be well seasoned with salt and pepper, and if liked there may be added a little minced onion, chives, parsley, APPENDIX chervil, or green pepper finely minced. The hash must be moistened a little with meat broth, milk, or water (not more than half a cupful for a quart of hash). When the hash is mixed, seasoned, and moistened put a tablespoonful of butter or savory drippings in a frying pan.
When this is melted put in the hash, and spread evenly and lightly in the pan. Over this put little dots of butter or savory drippings, using about one tablespoonful in all. Cover the pan and place where the hash will not burn, but where the heat is fairly good, and cook half an hour, then fold and turn on a hot platter. A rich brown crust will have formed on the bottom of the hash if the heat was sufficient. Serve very hot. The plates on which hash is served should be hot.
Rice. Wash 1 cupful of rice in several waters, rubbing the grains between the hands to remove all the dirt. Put the washed rice in a stewpan with 2½ cupfuls of water and 1 teaspoonful of salt. Cover and place where the water will boil. Cook for twenty minutes, being careful not to let it burn. At the end of this time put the stewpan on a tripod or ring and cover the rice with a fold of cheese cloth. Let it continue to cook in this manner an hour, then turn into a hot vegetable dish. The rice will be tender, dry, and sweet, and each grain will be separate. During the whole process of cooking the rice must not be stirred. If a tablespoonful of butter is cut up and sprinkled over the rice when it has cooked twenty minutes the dish will be very much improved. - Hominy and Corn Meal. The large hominy, which is so common in the southern part of the United States, is frequently served as a vegetable, either boiled or fried in drippings. Fine hominy, which is more common in the northern part of the country, and which is often served as a vegetable, should be thoroughly washed, and cooked in boiling water in the proportion of 1 gill of hominy to a pint of water, to which a half teaspoonful of salt has been added. When cold, the boiled hominy may be cut in slices and fried. The slices will brown more readily if they are first rolled in flour.
Fried corn-meal mush is often served as a vegetable, with chicken and other meats, and is very palatable and useful when fresh vegetables are not common. It is interesting to note that in the Southern States rice and hominy are much oftener used as starchy vegetables in place of potatoes than in other parts of the country.
Three side dishes run together on one page: a skillet hash, boiled rice, and hominy. The hash and the rice both hinge on the same rule, which is to leave the pan alone.
- Don't stir the hashOnce the hash is spread in the pan, it is not touched again until it is folded over and turned out. The half hour of undisturbed contact with the pan is what builds the brown crust; stirring gives you scrambled vegetables instead.
- Moisture is capped for a reasonHalf a cup of liquid per quart of hash is deliberately stingy. More than that and the hash steams rather than fries, and no crust forms. Add the liquid a spoonful at a time if your cooked potato is already damp.
- Heat level"Where the heat is fairly good" but won't burn gives no setting; something like medium-low on a modern gas burner is the usual reading. A heavy skillet, cast iron or thick-bottomed, helps over thirty minutes of covered cooking.
- Savory drippingsBacon fat, beef drippings or rendered chicken fat. Butter alone will darken over half an hour; a mix of butter and a neutral fat is more forgiving.
- The rice timing is very longTwenty minutes at a boil followed by an hour over a diffuser is far longer than modern practice; the rice available and the stoves in use may account for part of it. Modern long-grain white rice is done in 15 to 18 minutes covered, then 10 minutes off the heat, so following the method as written should be expected to give a soft result.
- Tripod or ringA metal stand that lifts the pan off the direct flame, the ancestor of a heat diffuser or flame tamer. The cheesecloth over the rice absorbs condensing steam so the drips don't fall back and make the grains gluey; a folded clean tea towel under the lid does the same.
- Washing riceAmerican rice no longer needs washing for dirt, and enriched rice loses some of its added vitamins in the rinse. Rinsing until the water runs clear still helps if you want fully separate grains, since it removes loose surface starch.
- A gillHalf a cup. So the hominy is cooked at one part grain to four parts water by volume, plus half a teaspoon of salt.
- Fine and large hominy"Fine hominy" is what is now sold as hominy grits; "large hominy" is whole nixtamalized corn, sold canned or dried as hominy or posole. The two are not interchangeable in these proportions.
- YieldThe rice makes about 3 cups cooked, four modest side servings. A quart of hash serves three to four.
"Kinks" here means tricks or dodges of the trade, and this page is a good example of the genre: not a formula so much as the reasoning behind one, aimed at a cook who already knows how to fry a potato but keeps ending up with mush. Hash was a standard American vehicle for the previous day's dinner, and the insistence that each vegetable be cut separately and that the particles "drop apart readily when shaken on a fork" reads as a corrective to hash's reputation as a slurry of leftovers, though the book does not say so. The closing note on rice and hominy standing in for potatoes in the South is the author's own observation, and matches the period picture of grits and rice as everyday Southern starches while Northern households leaned on potatoes; the "large hominy" described here is nixtamalized corn, the technique having come to the Southern kitchen from Native American practice, and is the same product still sold for posole.