Baked Hash
Take cold beef or veal, chop the me at very fine, put it in a pan with some water; add salt, pepper, butter and bread crumbs to taste. Season with a little chopped onion, parsley and thyme, all minced fine, half a cup milk or cream with one egg beaten. Grate some crumbs over the top, and bake till brown.--Mrs. J. H. F.
A nineteenth-century way of finishing off a roast: the meat is bound with custard rather than potato, then browned in the oven. The recipe gives no quantities beyond the milk and egg, so treat it as a ratio.
- Working proportionsAbout 3 cups finely chopped cooked beef or veal, 1 cup soft breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup milk or cream, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons butter and roughly 1/4 cup water or leftover gravy. That fills a 1 1/2-quart dish and serves four.
- The water matters"Put it in a pan with some water" is the hinge. Cold roast meat is dry, and without enough liquid the hash bakes into a dry brick. Stock or leftover gravy is better than plain water; the mixture should look loose, almost sloppy, before it goes in the oven.
- Chop, do not grindPeriod cooks chopped meat with a knife or in a wooden bowl, which leaves distinct shreds. A food processor turns cooked beef to paste in seconds; pulse a few times at most, or hand-chop.
- OvenNo temperature is given. 375F for 30 to 40 minutes browns the top without drying the interior; the custard should be set when a knife comes out clean.
- HerbsThe thyme is probably fresh, roughly a teaspoon chopped; use about a third of that if dried. The onion is raw going in, so keep it very fine or soften it in the butter first, since baked hash does not cook long enough to tame coarse onion.
- SaltingRoast beef and veal are already seasoned, and leftover gravy is saltier still. Taste the mixture before adding the egg rather than salting to a formula.
- The crumb top"Grate some crumbs over the top" implies dry crumbs from a stale loaf rather than soft fresh ones. Toss them with a little melted butter, or they scorch in patches instead of browning evenly.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, many of them identified only by initials, is full of dishes like this one: not company food but the logic of a household that roasted large joints and expected every scrap to reappear. Baked hash sits in a long line of English and American "made dishes," cold meat rechauffed with crumbs and a binding of egg and cream, and it is closer kin to a savory bread pudding than to the fried corned-beef hash the word now suggests. The initialed attribution is characteristic of the book, which reads as a collective document of the post-Civil War Upper South.