Home › Vegetables › Hashed Brown Potatoes
Hashed Brown Potatoes
2 tablespoons oil or drippings 6 boiled potatoes Salt and pepper Chop the potatoes, adding salt, and a dash of pepper. Melt the fat in a frying-pan and, when hot, add the chopped potatoes to the depth of one inch. Press the potatoes down in the pan, packing them firmly. Cook slowly, without stirring, until the potato is brown. Then begin at one side of the pan and fold the potatoes over on the other like an omelet, packing closely together. Turn upside down on a hot serving platter and serve hot.
A plain skillet potato cake from the era before shredded frozen hash browns. The whole thing turns on patience: one slow browning, no stirring.
- The hingeDo not stir. The crust forms only if the packed layer sits undisturbed on steady low heat, which will take a good while -- the recipe says only "cook slowly" and gives no time. Poking at it produces loose fried potato instead of a cake that will fold.
- Start with cold potatoesThe recipe says only "boiled potatoes," but cooled ones (boiled ahead, even the day before) chop and hold far better. Warm potatoes shed starch and steam, and the cake is likelier to fall apart.
- Chop, not shredThe recipe calls for chopping, not the shreds sold today, so aim for a rough dice. Waxy or all-purpose potatoes hold that dice; very floury baking potatoes crumble.
- DrippingsThe recipe allows either, and bacon or beef drippings suit the dish's flavor. Any neutral oil works; butter alone will darken before the crust sets.
- Pan sizeSix potatoes at a one-inch depth wants a 10-inch skillet, cast iron for preference. Too wide a pan gives a thin layer that tears when folded.
- The fold and turnFolding omelet-style then inverting puts the browned face upward on the platter. Loosen the edges with a thin spatula first, and invert over the platter in one motion rather than sliding.
- YieldSix potatoes serves four to six as a side dish. Season more heavily than seems right at the chopping stage; salt added afterward sits only on the surface.
Hashed browns descend from plain "hash" -- chopped leftovers refried -- and the name appears simply to describe the treatment: the potatoes are hashed, then browned. The dish belongs to the American breakfast and supper table of the late nineteenth century, when cold boiled potatoes were a common surplus in households that boiled a pot of them for dinner. Recipes of this kind, calling for a packed cake folded and inverted, appear in turn-of-the-century domestic cookbooks and are often likened to the Swiss rösti. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Delineator, a Butterick magazine aimed at homemakers, and the entry is typical of its economical approach: a second meal built from what was already cooked.