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Mixed Hash (Pt hashed turkey chicken)
1 pt. hashed turkey chicken or beef. 3 small potatoes. 1 tablespoon browned flour. 1/2 pt. stock. 1 tablespoon butter.
Heat butter, add flour and stock. When it starts to cook add potatoes, cook until potatoes are tender, put in chopped meat, serve on toast.
A leftover-meat gravy dish that lives or dies on the browned flour, which is what gives it colour and a nutty flavour rather than the pallor of a plain white sauce. Everything else is straightforward.
- Browned flourToast the flour in a dry skillet over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it is the colour of light brown sugar, then let it cool before using. Browning costs flour much of its thickening power, so the sauce here will be light-bodied. Period cookbooks often suggest browning a quantity at once and keeping it in a jar.
- Old measuresA pint of hashed meat is 2 cups, about 10 oz once chopped. Half a pint of stock is 1 cup. The three "small" potatoes come to roughly 10-12 oz.
- Cut the potatoes smallThe recipe cooks the potatoes in only a cup of liquid, so dice them to 1/4 inch or they will not be tender before the sauce reduces away. Add a splash more stock if the pan goes dry.
- Add the meat last, and brieflyThe turkey, chicken or beef is already cooked. It needs two or three minutes to heat through; longer and it turns stringy, particularly poultry breast.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed. Commercial stock is far saltier than the homemade stock assumed here, so taste before adding any.
- YieldServes two generously or three modestly, over buttered toast. Toast the bread only when the hash is ready, since it softens fast under the gravy.
Hash of this kind — chopped cooked meat bound in a thin gravy and spooned over toast — was a standard American answer to using up a roast, and the fact that the recipe lists "turkey chicken or beef" interchangeably shows it is really a method for whatever is in the larder rather than a dish in its own right. Browned flour, the one refinement here, was widely used in nineteenth-century kitchens on both sides of the Atlantic: it gave gravies a deep colour without the bottled browning sauces that were coming into use.