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Baked Hash (Chop and season any cold meat)
Chop and season any cold meat; do the same with cold potatoes, and put alternate layers in a dish with bits of butter between. Finish with rolled biscuits and bits of butter on top. Pour over this some good stock, and bake half an hour.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you had cold roast and boiled potatoes on hand. Two phrases need translating before it will work.
- "Rolled biscuits" means crumbs"Rolled biscuits" most likely means crumbs -- Not soft baking-powder biscuits: in this period "biscuit" often meant a hard cracker, and "rolled" the act of crushing it under a rolling pin, giving a crumb topping. Plain unsalted cracker crumbs or coarse dry breadcrumbs do the same job.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives none. Roughly equal volumes of meat and potato, both chopped to about half-inch dice rather than minced, works well; about a pound of each will fill a shallow two-quart dish.
- Stock quantityThe recipe gives none. Pour in enough to moisten the layers well without submerging them, adding it gradually. Too much and the crumb top sinks into soup; too little and the meat dries out.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; 350F for the half hour is a reasonable modern equivalent. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the bake is only to heat through and brown the top.
- Season harder than you thinkCold cooked meat and boiled potatoes are both bland and both absorb salt. Season each layer as you build it, not just the surface, and add pepper, a little onion, and any pan gravy you have left.
- Reheating leftoversBring the assembled dish to a full heat through the center, not merely warm. Cooked meat held in a refrigerator for days should be reheated to steaming, and cold hash that has sat at room temperature while you build the layers benefits from hot stock poured over it.
Baked hash belongs to the long tradition of American "made dishes" built on the Sunday roast's remains. Fireless cookers, insulated boxes that finished food on retained heat, were promoted heavily in the 1900s and 1910s as fuel-saving, labor-saving equipment for the servantless household, and cookbooks of the period often carried a whole chapter of dishes adapted to them. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format comes from the same efficiency-minded moment in domestic science. The cracker-crumb topping stands in for a pastry lid.