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White Hashed Potatoes
Butter the blazer and put into it about three cups of cold chopped potato, salted during the
The text on this page breaks off mid-sentence, so what survives is the setup rather than the whole method. What it does tell you is enough to work from if you know the chafing dish.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, the one that sits directly over the flame. Recipes of this era distinguish it from the water pan beneath, used for custards and anything that must not scorch. Hashed potatoes want direct heat, so the blazer goes straight over the lamp with no water bath.},{"label":"Substitute pan","text":"A heavy 8- or 10-inch skillet over medium heat behaves the same way. A chafing-dish flame is weak by modern standards, so expect browning to take longer in the original apparatus than on a gas burner.
- Cold chopped potatoBoiled or steamed potatoes, cooled thoroughly, are what this calls for; the recipe specifies only that they be cold. Warm potato tends to break down into paste when it hits the butter, while cold potato holds its edges and browns.
- "Salted during the..."The sentence was probably completed with something like "during the boiling" — that is, the potatoes salted in their cooking water rather than in the pan — but the page breaks off and we cannot know. Salting the cut surfaces draws out some moisture, which may work against browning.
- What is missingA dish of this name would typically be finished with cream or milk, a little more butter, and pepper, cooked until the liquid is absorbed and the bottom just colors, though the printed page stops before any of that. Treat it as a fragment and not a complete method.
- YieldThree cups of chopped potato would serve two, perhaps three as a side; the recipe gives no yield. Chafing-dish cookery was often associated with small late-evening gatherings rather than family dinners.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in America from the 1890s into the 1910s, and books like this one were written for it: the equipment sat on the sideboard or the table, ran on an alcohol lamp, and let a hostess produce hot food after the theater without waking the kitchen. That context explains the ingredient list here. Cold cooked potato was exactly the sort of thing already in the icebox, and a dish built from leftovers cooked in front of guests was part of the appeal rather than an embarrassment. "White" hashed potatoes seems to point to the plain cream-and-butter version, though what exactly it was meant to distinguish the dish from is not spelled out; the same usage runs through the creamed vegetable dishes of the period, where white meant a milk or cream base and nothing colored added.