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Hashed Brown Potatoes
4 medium sized potatoes 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons milk 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Slice or chop cold boiled potatoes, and place in a buttered pan. Add the salt, and mix with two tablespoons melted butter. Place in a hot oven until nicely browned. Stir, add the milk, and brown again. Stir again, and brown the third time.
A skillet dish here pushed into the oven, which makes it far more forgiving than stovetop hash browns. The technique is repeated browning with a stir between each pass.
- Hot oven"A hot oven" in books of this period generally means something in the region of 400-450F. Use a heavy metal or cast-iron pan so the base holds heat and crisps rather than steams.
- Cold potatoes are the pointBoiled potatoes must be thoroughly chilled, ideally cooked the day before. Warm potatoes shed starch and slump into mush instead of holding a slice or dice.
- Salt1 1/2 teaspoons for four potatoes is on the assertive side by modern taste, and depends on whether the potatoes were salted during boiling. Start with a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- ButterTwo tablespoons is a lean amount for four potatoes; the original assumes a buttered pan on top of it. Three to four tablespoons total gives better browning without frying.
- The milkAdded only after the first browning, it softens and binds the interior while the surface re-crisps. Adding it at the start would simply steam everything.
- Three browns, not oneEach stir turns pale surfaces down onto the hot pan. The recipe gives no timings; each pass will take some minutes in a hot oven, and the total is considerable, so go by colour rather than the clock.
- YieldServes three to four as a side, or two as the main of a breakfast or supper.
Hashed potatoes belong to the older, thriftier meaning of hash: cold cooked food chopped and revived with fat and heat. Recipes of this kind appear throughout nineteenth-century American cookery under names like fried potatoes, hashed potatoes and Lyonnaise, all built on the assumption that a household boiled potatoes in quantity and had leftovers to hand. The oven method here suits a coal or wood range, where the firebox stayed hot for hours and a pan could be pushed in and left. A dish like this also sits comfortably within a vegetarian cookery tradition that leaned on starch, butter and milk for the satisfying weight a meat course would otherwise have supplied - a habit found in Seventh-day Adventist and other reform-minded kitchens, which are often credited with an influence on the meatless recipe writing of the era.