Home › Meat Substitutes › Rice Hash
Rice Hash
1 cup of bread crumbs 1 tablespoon of butter 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley Pepper 1 large onion chopped 1 ounce of boiled rice 1 cup of chopped mushrooms 2 peeled tomatoes chopped Salt Mix the tomatoes, the bread crumbs, mushrooms, and rice. Fry the onion in the butter until it is a light brown and soft. Then add the bread crumb mixture and seasoning. Mix it thoroughly and simmer for one hour.
A wartime meat substitute that works as a skillet dish, but the quantities need reading carefully before you start — one ounce of rice and two tomatoes will not survive an hour of simmering unaided.
- Moisture is the hingeTwo chopped tomatoes and a cup of crumbs will bind into a dry paste within fifteen minutes over direct heat. Cover the pan and add stock or water a few tablespoons at a time; the hour of simmering is meant to soften the onion and marry the flavours, not to dehydrate the mixture.
- The ounce of riceAmbiguous as written. One ounce of dry rice is a scant two tablespoons, which yields roughly half a cup boiled; one ounce of already-boiled rice is barely two tablespoons of finished grain. Given the phrase "boiled rice", the smaller reading is likely, but the dish is more balanced with about half a cup of cooked rice.
- Bread crumbsRecipes of this kind used both dry, grated stale crumbs and soft fresh ones, and this one does not say which. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid; with fresh crumbs you may need rather less, or the hash will be gluey.
- MushroomsA cup of chopped mushrooms releases a good deal of water. Sauté them with the onion until that water has cooked off and they begin to colour — this is where most of the savoury depth in a meatless hash comes from.
- PanA wide heavy skillet or a shallow saucepan, lidded. A thin pan over an hour will scorch the tomato sugars onto the base.
- SeasoningThe original gives salt, pepper and a tablespoon of chopped parsley, though the parsley never reappears in the method. A spoonful of soy or mushroom ketchup, or a little thyme, adds savoury depth without altering the character of the dish.
- YieldTwo modest servings as a main, or four as a side. Some skillet hashes are turned out and browned briefly on the underside before serving, though this recipe does not say so.
"Hash" comes from the French hacher, to chop, and for most of the nineteenth century it generally meant yesterday's roast cut small and reheated, often with gravy alone and often with potato. A hash built on rice, crumbs and mushrooms belongs to a different moment: the meat-conservation cookery of the kind that spread through Britain and the United States, in which the absence of meat was treated as a patriotic arrangement rather than a dietary choice — though nothing here fixes the dish to a particular date. The logic of the dish is economy of both cost and structure — mushrooms and browned onion supply the savoury note, tomato the acidity, crumbs and rice the bulk that a chopped joint would have given. Rice was said to be a favoured stretcher in such cookery because it was cheap, shelf-stable and, unlike wheat flour, thought not to be subject to the same conservation appeals.