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Fourteenth Day
"Don't you think it's about time for us to cook another breakfast, Aunt Jane?" asked Grace. "We want to have some different things this time; none of the same except the coffee." "I'm willing," answered her aunt. "We'll do it tomorrow if you like; and in the mean time I must give you some breakfast recipes. Here is one of the oldest, easiest and most respectable."
No. 174 CORNED BEEF HASH.
Take tender boiled corned beef, entirely free from fat or gristle, chop it fine, and mix with it chopped boiled potatoes in the proportion of one cup of beef to three of potatoes. Add enough salt to season the potatoes, pepper to your taste, mix very thoroughly together and let it stand over night. Half an hour before the time to serve, place it on the fire in an iron frying pan, with one tablespoonful of cold water and a teaspoonful of butter to each cup of the mixture. Let this cook slowly on the back of the stove, stirring frequently; if it becomes too dry, add boiling water. Taste it, and if not sufficiently seasoned, throw in more pepper and salt, but very cautiously.
Serve very hot. "Why, that receipt's long enough for a mince pie, Aunt Jane," said Grace. "You'll find that following it carefully makes all the difference between good hash and poor, uneatable stuff," answered her aunt. "When hash is tossed together in a hurry it isn't the same thing as this."
No. 175-POTATOES a la Maitre D'Hotel.
Cut cold boiled potatoes into irregular slices, not large, and heat in a saucepan with a little milk and butter, pepper, salt and some chopped parsley. Place it over a hot fire, stirring all the time until ready to serve. To make a French dish of this, stir in half the juice of a lemon or a teaspoonful of sharp vinegar.
No. 176-POTATO PUFF.
Take two cupfuls cold mashed potato and stir into it two tablespoonfuls melted butter, beating to a light cream. When this is done, add to it two eggs beaten very light and a teacupful cream or milk, with salt to taste. Beat again and bake in a quick oven until browned. "We made the croquettes for lunch, you remember," said Aunt Jane, "and the puff is very hard on your little arms, for it is nothing without a great deal of beating; so we'll be contented this time with maitre d'hotel." "What does that mean, Aunty?" "A maitre d'hotel is the chief steward of a hotel or restaurant, or, in very elegant establishments, of a private family, and as he often combines a knowledge of cookery with his other accomplishments, it was natural to name a dish after him. In case you should ever want to cook a winter breakfast, I'll tell you a way to do codfish." No. 177-TOSSED-UP CODFISH.
Pick to pieces cold boiled codfish, or use the desiccated, which is already prepared. Prepare half a pint of thin drawn-butter, to which add half a pint sweet milk, three hard-boiled eggs cut up fine, a tablespoonful of butter, a few grains red pepper and some chopped parsley. Heat this till nearly boiling, then throw in the fish and boil up once, after which serve in a deep dish on buttered toast. It must be hot.
No. 178-DRAWN BUTTER.
Four breakfast dishes built on leftovers, in the pattern of most nineteenth-century morning cookery: yesterday's boiled meat, potatoes and fish, revived with butter. A few of the instructions assume a coal range and a pantry that no longer exists.
- The hinge: hash is cooked slowly, not fried"The back of the stove" means the cooler end of a coal range — the equivalent of medium-low to low on a burner. The half hour lets the beef and potato heat through and meld, with frequent stirring and a splash of boiling water if it dries; over high heat it dries out and scorches.
- The overnight restLeaving the seasoned mixture to stand lets salt and pepper penetrate the potato. Refrigerate it, covered, rather than leaving it out as Aunt Jane's readers would have done in a cold pantry.
- Hash proportionsOne cup beef to three of potato is a lean, potato-forward ratio typical of an economy dish. Modern diner hash runs closer to 1:1; if you want more beef, add it, but keep enough potato to bind.
- A quick ovenFor the potato puff, a "quick oven" is generally reckoned at around 400–425F. Bake in a buttered dish until set and browned; the recipe gives no time.
- Teacupful and cupfulThe book uses "cupful" and "teacupful" as different measures. Period teacups varied; a "teacupful" is usually reckoned somewhere between half and three-quarters of a cup. The puff is forgiving either way.
- Desiccated codfishThis was shredded dried salt cod sold in boxes. Salt cod is still available and must be soaked in several changes of cold water before it goes anywhere near the sauce, or the dish will be inedibly salty; a thick whole fillet can need 12 to 24 hours, shredded cod much less. Cold cooked fresh cod, the first option given, needs no such treatment.
- Red pepperCayenne, and "a few grains" means it. In this sauce a scant pinch is enough.
- Drawn butterThe recipe is cut off at the end of the page. Drawn butter in American books of this era is a simple white sauce: butter melted, blended with flour, thinned with hot water and simmered until smooth — not the clarified butter the term means in British usage. Half a pint of it, thinned with half a pint of milk, gives the codfish a light coating sauce.
- YieldNo yields are stated. On the quantities given, the hash will make roughly four servings, the potato puff four to six as a side, and the codfish about four on toast.
Six Little Cooks belongs to a small genre of children's cookery books that taught by narrative — a set of girls, an aunt, numbered receipts dropped into the conversation — and its breakfast chapter suggests the sort of thing that might appear on a middle-class breakfast table: reheated meat, reheated potato, salt fish. Corned beef hash is the oldest of the four in spirit, a direct descendant of the boiled dinner, whose leftovers were chopped (French hacher, to cut up) and stretched with potato. Aunt Jane's insistence that the long recipe is the difference between good hash and "uneatable stuff" is the real lesson of the page. Her gloss on maître d'hôtel is also worth noting: by the 1870s the term had already detached from the man and attached to the treatment — butter, parsley, lemon — which is how it survives on menus now.