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Baked Hash (Cups cold meat tablespoon)
2 cups cold meat 1 tablespoon butter 2 cups cold potatoes 2 cups stock Seasoning to taste Melt the butter in the stock; add the meat and potato, finely chopped or run through a meat chopper. Season to taste; put in a greased baking dish and bake until nicely browned.
A leftovers dish with no oven temperature, no time and no pan size, which is typical of loose-leaf cards written for cooks who already knew what hash looked like. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- Oven and timeBake at 375-400F, uncovered, for 30 to 45 minutes, until the top is set and browned and the edges bubble. Covering it traps steam and you will never get colour.
- The stock is the hingeTwo cups of stock to four cups of chopped solids gives a soft, spoonable hash rather than a crisp cake. If you want a firmer result, start with one cup and add more only if the mixture looks dry; the potato will absorb liquid as it bakes.
- "Meat chopper"A hand-cranked grinder. A food processor pulsed a few times does the same job, but stop while the texture is still coarse -- run it long and cold potato turns to paste.
- Cold potatoesMeans already-cooked potatoes, boiled or baked and chilled. Cold ones hold their shape through chopping; freshly boiled potatoes go gluey.
- Seasoning to tasteSalt, black pepper and a little grated onion would all be at home here. Worcestershire sauce, mustard or a spoonful of ketchup all suit it, and a handful of buttered crumbs over the top helps the browning.
- Reheating cooked meatWhatever the meat was, bring the finished dish through to steaming hot in the centre -- 165F -- rather than pulling it as soon as the surface colours.
- YieldAbout four servings as a main course with a green vegetable or a poached egg on top.
- The stray lineThe trailing "2 cups cold beef" looks like a stray from the card layout, most likely an alternative for the first ingredient rather than an addition to it.
Hash is one of the oldest working answers to the problem of Monday dinner: the word comes from the French hacher, to chop, and the dish is simply yesterday's roast reduced small enough to be stretched with potato. Dishes of this kind belong to a tradition of making a little meat do the work of a lot -- the sense in which American household manuals of the early twentieth century tended to use such headings, and one often associated with the food-conservation campaigns of the First World War, though the connection here is inference rather than anything the card itself records. The loose-leaf format itself belongs to that era of domestic-science publishing, when cookbooks were sold as binders so a housekeeper could add, reorder and discard cards as her household required.