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Creamed Hash
1 pint cold meat Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 cu cream sauce Chop the meat very fine; season it and add the onion and parsley. Make the cream sauce in a double boiler; stir in the meat; beat thoroughly and serve on squares of toasted bread.
Cold mutton
A leftovers dish built on a cup of white sauce. The measurements are by volume, which is how cold meat was reckoned in this period, and one word has been garbled in the original.
- "1 cu cream sauce"A typesetting slip for 1 cup. Cream sauce here is the standard medium white sauce of the era: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked smooth and seasoned.
- A pint of meatCold cooked meat measured by volume after chopping, somewhere between three-quarters of a pound and a pound depending on how finely it is cut and how closely it is packed. Any roast will do; the trailing "Cold mutton" is a fragment, either the start of a cut-off suggestion or the heading of the next recipe.
- Onion juiceNot a bottled product. Grate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or press a peeled half against the grater and collect what runs. A teaspoon is about what half a small onion gives.
- "Beat thoroughly"Means stir vigorously to break the meat into the sauce, not whip. The mixture should be thick enough to hold its shape on toast rather than run off it.
- Reheating cold meatA double boiler heats gently, and gently is not always enough. Bring the finished mixture to a full steaming heat, 165F, before it goes to the table; leftover meat is exactly the material that rewards a thermometer.
- The toastCut squares from bread at least half an inch thick and toast them dry and firm. Thin modern sandwich bread collapses under a cup of sauced meat within a minute.
- YieldServes three to four as a light supper or lunch dish, two if it is the whole meal.
Filing this under "Meat Substitutes" says a good deal about how the phrase was used a century ago. It did not always mean vegetarian cooking; often it meant a dish that stood in for a joint of fresh meat at the centre of the table, usually by stretching what was left of Sunday's roast through Tuesday with a sauce, an egg, or a starch. Creamed hash is the mildest member of a large family that includes croquettes, timbales, rissoles and scalloped everything, all of them ways to make a pint of cold mutton read as a course. White sauce was the workhorse binding agent of Anglo-American domestic-science cookery, taught in graded thicknesses in cooking schools and reproduced in many household manuals of the period.