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Potato and Onion Hash
2 cups chopped, boiled onions 2 teaspoons salt 4 cups cold minced potatoes 4 tablespoons butter Peel the onions, and cook in boiling, salted water in an uncovered vessel until tender. Drain, and cut the onion into small pieces. Mince cold boiled potatoes by putting them through a food chopper, or slice. Mix the potatoes and onions, sprinkle with salt, and dot the potatoes with the butter. Cover, and bake in the oven until thoroughly heated, then uncover and brown. When browned on top, stir the potatoes from the bottom, and brown again.
A plain skillet-style hash done in the oven rather than on the stove. Nothing here is difficult, but the original gives no oven temperature and no yield, and the salt is high by current habits.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe assumes you know your own range. Use 400F: hot enough to crisp the top once uncovered, not so hot that the butter browns before the interior heats through. Figure 20-25 minutes covered, then 15-20 uncovered with one turn from the bottom.
- The hinge: cold potatoesBoiled potatoes must be fully cold before they are chopped or they turn to paste and the hash will never brown. Boil them the day before, or at minimum chill them several hours. Waxy or all-purpose potatoes hold their shape better here than a mealy baking potato.
- "Food chopper"A hand-cranked meat grinder with a coarse plate, clamped to the table. A food processor is not the same tool and will overwork the starch in seconds. Chop by hand into rough half-inch pieces, or use the slicing option the recipe already offers.
- Uncovered onionsThe recipe specifies an open pot. The usual explanation given is that leaving the lid off lets volatile sulphur compounds go off with the steam, keeping the onions milder and paler; whatever the mechanism, keep the lid off as instructed. Drain them well and press out excess water, or the hash steams instead of browning.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for six cups of vegetables, on top of salted cooking water, reads as heavy now. Start with one teaspoon and correct at the table.
- ButterFour tablespoons is not much fat for six cups of vegetables. Dot it over the surface as directed and add a little more to the bottom of the dish so the underside crusts when you stir it up.
- YieldAbout six cups of hash, serving four to six as a main dish with an egg or a salad, or six to eight as a side.
Meatless cookbooks of this kind belong to a specific moment in American publishing: the years around the First World War, when Food Administration campaigns for meatless and wheatless days pushed home cooks toward substitutes, and when vegetarian and health-reform movements had already built an audience for them. Filing a potato-and-onion hash among meat substitutes tells you what such a category really meant -- not a protein analogue, but a dish substantial enough to hold the centre of a plate where a chop or a slice of roast would otherwise sit. Hash itself is older and thriftier than any of that; the word comes from the French hacher, to chop, and the dish was traditionally a way of reheating yesterday's boiled vegetables and meat scraps. Here the meat is simply left out, and the butter and the browned crust are asked to do the work of making it taste like dinner.