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Haystack Hash
LEFTOVER LEAN MEAT 2-3 SLICES DRY BREAD 3-4 SLICES ONION 3-4 PARSLEY SPRIGS 1/2 CUP MASHED POTATOES SALT AND PEPPER CATSUP I TABLESPOON MELTED BUTTER MILK I EGG YOLK Chop leftovers of roast, steak, chops or game with bread, onion, and parsley. Mix with mashed potatoes, seasonings, butter, and just enough milk to hold everything together. Pile in a haystack on a buttered pie plate, break egg yolk over, and bake 30 minutes in moderate oven, until golden brown all over.
An ingredient list without weights, aimed at whatever cold meat is on hand. The proportions are elastic; the binding is the only thing that has to be right.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Thirty minutes is enough to heat the mound through and set the surface, since every component is already cooked.
- QuantitiesNothing is weighed. Roughly 2 cups of chopped cooked meat suits the half cup of mashed potato, 2-3 slices of bread and one egg yolk given here; that makes two generous servings.
- Reheating cooked meatLeftover roast or game should be well chilled until the moment it is chopped, and the finished mound should reach 165F at the centre. A mound of dense hash heats slowly, so check rather than trust the clock.
- The bread is structuralDry bread chopped in with the meat absorbs juices and keeps the haystack standing. Fresh bread turns pasty; use bread that has genuinely staled, or oven-dried slices.
- Milk, added last and sparinglyThe hinge of the dish. Add milk a spoonful at a time only until the mixture just coheres when pressed. Too much and the haystack slumps flat on the plate and steams instead of browning.
- CatsupIt appears in the list but not in the method. A tablespoon or two worked in with the seasonings is the obvious reading; it can equally be served alongside.
- The egg yolkBroken over the top, it is a glaze rather than a binder. Beat it with a teaspoon of water and brush it over the mound for even colour, otherwise it pools in one streak.
- ChoppingHand-chop the meat with a heavy knife. A food processor reduces cooked meat to paste in seconds and the hash loses all texture.
- The pie plateButter it well. The sugars in the catsup and the meat juices will stick.
Hash is leftover cookery given a shape, and the name comes from the French hacher, to chop. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century household books are full of variations that differ mainly in the binder — potato, breadcrumb, gravy, egg — and in whether the result is fried flat in a skillet or baked. Piling it into a cone and baking it, as here, has an obvious practical appeal: one plate, one oven, no turning, and the mound browns on every face at once. The heading appears to reflect a convention in American outdoor and camp cookery of dressing plain recipes in supposed frontier or "Indian" idiom, a framing that says a great deal more about the publishers of such books than about any actual cooking tradition.