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Hashed Browned Potatoes (Chop two cold boiled potatoes)
Chop two cold boiled potatoes fine, dust with salt and pepper. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a frying-pan, when hot put in the potatoes. Spread them out perfectly even and about half an inch in thickness. Stand the pan over a moderate fire and cook slowly without stirring for about fifteen minutes. Then begin at one side of the pan and roll over carefully as for an omelet. Pack or bank the potatoes against one side of the pan. Take a small meat dish, place it against the side of the pan, turn the pan over, turning out the potatoes on to the dish in a roll nicely browned over the outside. Considerable practice is required before one can manage the roll without breaking.
A two-potato skillet cake, cooked once and never stirred, then rolled like an omelet. The technique is the whole recipe.
- Do not touch itThe crust forms only if the potatoes sit undisturbed against the pan. The recipe is explicit that there is no stirring at all during the fifteen minutes; disturbing the cake is likely to stop it knitting together, and the roll will collapse.
- Moderate fireOn a gas or electric burner this is roughly medium-low. High heat will brown the surface before the interior mass has set and knit together, which can cause the roll to tear.
- Use the right potatoCold boiled russets or other floury potatoes give up enough starch to bind. Waxy new potatoes stay as separate cubes and will not hold a roll.
- Cold means coldBoil the potatoes the day before and refrigerate them. Warm potatoes are wet and gummy and will steam rather than brown.
- Pan sizeTwo potatoes at half an inch deep suit an 8-inch skillet. A larger pan spreads the layer too thin to roll; cast iron or a well-seasoned carbon steel pan releases best.
- ButterA tablespoon is not generous for a pan this size. If the surface looks dry at the edges as it cooks, slip in a little more at the rim rather than over the top.
- YieldServes two as a side dish, one as a breakfast. Scale up by cooking a second batch rather than deepening the layer.
- The turn outLoosen the whole cake with a thin metal spatula before you begin rolling, and warm the serving dish. If the roll breaks, serve it in wedges; the flavour is identical.
"Hashed browned" is the older and more literal form of what American menus later shortened to hash browns, and it means what it says: cooked potato hashed, or chopped small, and browned. The recipe's own instruction to roll the cake "as for an omelet" borrows a presentation from French omelet technique. The frank admission that considerable practice is required is characteristic of the period's domestic-science writers, who were addressing readers learning technique from a book rather than from a mother in the kitchen. The dish also reflects a working economy of leftovers: cold boiled potatoes were a standing surplus in any household that boiled potatoes daily, and a whole family of recipes existed to turn them into something worth serving again.