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Delmonico's Corned Beef Hash
Take equal quantities of chopped corned beef and cold baked potatoes; mix well and season highly with salt and pepper. Grease the sides and bottom of a spider or thick-bottomed pan, put in the hash, put on the side of the fire until thoroughly heated. To 1 quart of the mixture, take ½ of a cupful of milk, pour it over the hash and put in a hot oven for twenty minutes. Turn out and serve.
A skillet hash of two ingredients in equal measure, finished in the oven with milk. The technique is sound; only the vocabulary and the fire have changed.
- A spiderA spider was a cast-iron frying pan, originally footed to stand over coals. Any heavy cast-iron or thick-bottomed ovenproof skillet does the same work, and it must be ovenproof since the pan goes straight into the heat.
- "The side of the fire"On a range this means a spot away from the hottest coals — moderate, steady heat rather than a hard sear. Medium-low on a burner, long enough to heat the mixture through before it goes in the oven.
- A hot ovenRead it as somewhere around 400–450F. The twenty minutes is there to set the milk and build a crust on the bottom, not to cook anything through — everything in the pan is already cooked.
- Season highly, but taste firstCorned beef carries a great deal of salt. Season the potato side of the mixture and check before adding more.
- Baked, not boiled, potatoesBaked potatoes are drier and hold their shape when chopped, where boiled ones break down more readily under a spatula. Day-old baked russets, skins off, chopped rather than mashed.
- The milkHalf a cup to a quart of mixture is a light hand — enough to bind and steam, not to make it soupy. Pour it over the surface just before the pan goes in, and do not stir it through.
- Turning out"Turn out" means inverting the whole cake onto a platter so the browned bottom faces up. It only works if the pan was properly greased and the hash was left undisturbed in the oven.
- YieldA quart of mixture will serve roughly four as a main course, or more alongside eggs.
Corned beef hash is the classic second life of a boiled dinner: the salt beef is cooked whole one day and the remains chopped with potato the next. Names like Delmonico's were often attached to everyday dishes in American cookbooks and household manuals of the period, borrowing the standing of New York's most famous restaurant — so the attribution need not mean the restaurant's own kitchen served this version. What distinguishes this one from a plain skillet hash is the oven finish with milk, a treatment closer to a gratin, which sets the mixture firmly enough to be turned out in a single cake rather than spooned. "Corned" itself is generally taken to refer to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used to cure the beef, a usage older than the dish.