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Breakfast Dish (Take the remnant of any cold)
Take the remnant of any cold meats, either boiled or roasted. Prepare it, as if for chicken salad, in fine shreds. Mix with potatoes mashed fine, and add two well-beaten eggs.
Season with butter, pepper, and other spices if you like. Make it into a loaf and bake it brown, or fry it in cakes if preferred.-Mrs.
A leftovers recipe with no quantities at all, which is the point: the proportions follow whatever cold meat you have. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- The ratio that makes it workRoughly equal volumes of shredded meat and mashed potato is a workable starting point, though the recipe gives none: more potato gives a softer, milder loaf, more meat a crumblier one. The two eggs are called for whatever the quantity of mixture, and will bind about a quart of it.
- "As if for chicken salad"That means picked and pulled into fine shreds by hand or with two forks, not chopped and not ground. Shreds keep the loaf from turning into paste.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes you know your range. Bake the loaf at 375F, uncovered, until the surface is well browned and the centre reaches 165F, about 45 minutes for a 1.5 lb loaf in a small pan.
- Reheating cooked meatCold roast or boiled meat that has been in the refrigerator should come back to 165F throughout. A shallow loaf or a thin cake gets there far more reliably than a deep one.
- The potato should be dryMashed potato made with much milk or cream will slump and steam rather than brown. Use potato mashed stiff, and if it is yesterday's, warm it enough to loosen before mixing.
- "Other spices if you like"Mace, nutmeg and a little cayenne were all in general use in cookery of this period and place, as were mushroom catsup and Worcestershire, though the recipe names none of them. Salt is not listed either; cold cooked meat will already carry some, so taste before adding any.
- Frying the cakesForm patties about three-quarters of an inch thick, chill them 20 minutes so they hold, and fry in butter or drippings over medium heat until a dark crust forms on each side, roughly 4 minutes a side.
- YieldA pound of picked cold meat with an equal amount of potato makes one loaf, serving about four, or roughly eight cakes; being heavier than the 1.5 lb loaf assumed above, it will need longer in the oven.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of entries like this one: signed with a name, short on measurement, and written for a cook who already knew what she was doing. The dish itself has no proper name because it is not really a dish so much as a household habit, the same thrift that produced English rissoles, French croquettes, and the American hash. Breakfast in a nineteenth-century Virginia house was a substantial meat meal, and the cold remains of the previous day's roast or boiled joint were expected to reappear at it in some altered form. Binding shredded meat with mashed potato and egg, then either baking it as a loaf or frying it in cakes, is the same logic that produced the salmon croquette and the potato cake, and the recipe's refusal to specify a meat is the clearest sign of its purpose: whatever was left, this is what you did with it.