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"The Green Mountain Boys" Red Flannel Hash
SALT AND PEPPER I CUP CHOPPED CANNED BEETS BACON FAT OR BUTTER I CUP CHOPPED COOKED POTATOES 2 TEASPOONS CANNED MILK 2 TEASPOONS BUTTER Season beets and potatoes and douse with enough hot water to make your mixture hold together. Melt fat in skillet, then add your beet mix and cook slowly. When wellheated, brown quickly and add milk and butter just before taking off the fire.
Chopped cooked meat may be substituted for part of the quantity of vegs, but if you do that be sure to use both beets and potatoes in equal parts.
Canned beets are pretty good and very practical, since it takes so long to boil raw ones. But campfire baked beets so long to boil raw ones. But campfire baked beets are swell, especially if fresh pulled, with earth still clinging to them. When done, the skin comes off easily, leaving a fine steaming root, blistering red.
A two-ingredient hash that lives or dies by the crust. The instructions are terse but complete: season, bind with a little hot water, then leave it alone in the pan.
- The hinge: don't stirPress the mixture flat and let it sit over moderate heat until a crust forms on the bottom, then raise the heat briefly to brown. Stirring keeps the starch wet and you get pink mush instead of hash.
- Canned milkEvaporated milk, not sweetened condensed. Two teaspoons is a gloss, not a sauce; heavy cream works the same way.
- Quantities and yieldOne cup beets plus one cup potatoes feeds one hungry person or two alongside eggs. Scale in equal parts and use a wider skillet rather than a deeper layer.
- Bacon fatRoughly a tablespoon or two in a 9- or 10-inch pan. The recipe allows bacon fat or butter; bacon fat is the usual choice for this dish.
- The hot waterAdd it a spoonful at a time. You want the mixture just tacky enough to hold a shape when pressed; too much and it will steam rather than brown.
- Adding meatCorned beef is the classic, chopped fine and cooked. The text says only to replace part of the vegetable volume, keeping beets and potatoes equal to each other.
- Baked beets in coalsWhole unpeeled beets buried in embers take roughly 45 minutes to over an hour depending on size and heat. Test with a skewer; as the text says, the skins slip off when they are done.
Red flannel hash is a New England dish, generally traced to the thrift of boiling-dinner leftovers: the beets, potatoes and corned beef from a New England boiled dinner chopped together and fried the next morning, the beet juice staining everything the color of a lumberman's shirt. The name is usually explained that way, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. The Green Mountain Boys were the Vermont militia of the 1770s, and attaching their name here is the sort of regional flourish outdoor cookbooks of the mid-twentieth century liked, when canned vegetables made a camp version of an old farm breakfast practical. The aside about canned beets being "pretty good and very practical" is the honest voice of that era of camp cooking: the can opener did more for the campfire than any piece of gear.