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Potato Hash
4 cold boiled potatoes
½ cup chopped onions
½ cup chopped celery or
2 tablespoons melted butter cooked celery root
Salt to taste
1 chopped pimento (canned)
Dice the potatoes and mix with the other ingredients; place in a shallow pan, place in a hot oven and bake until brown. Stir the potatoes and brown again; repeat two or three times until the potatoes have been browned throughout.
A dry-roasted potato hash with no meat in it, from an era when "hash" simply meant chopped and browned. The ingredient list has been mangled by the original two-column typesetting; read it carefully before shopping.
- Untangling the ingredientsThe columns have run together. The list is: 4 cold boiled potatoes, ½ cup chopped onion, ½ cup chopped celery or cooked celery root, 2 tablespoons melted butter, salt to taste, and 1 chopped canned pimento.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. Anything cooler and the potatoes steam in their own moisture instead of crusting.
- The hinge: cold potatoesThey should be thoroughly cold before dicing; boiling them a day ahead is one convenient way to manage it. Warm, freshly boiled potatoes shed starch and steam, and the dice are more likely to slump than to brown at the edges.
- Shallow pan, single layerA heavy rimmed sheet pan or cast-iron skillet, potatoes in one layer with space between them. Crowding is the usual reason a hash never browns.
- Butter is not enough fatTwo tablespoons for four potatoes is sparing by modern habit and butter solids will scorch at this heat. Toss the dice to coat evenly, or use part oil if the pan runs dry between turns.
- Stirring and timingThe recipe gives no times. Something like 35 to 45 minutes overall, with a turn roughly every 10 minutes, fits the direction to repeat 'two or three times'. Turn with a thin metal spatula and scrape rather than stir, so the crust comes up with the potato.
- Canned pimentoStill sold in small jars, sweet and already cooked soft. The recipe mixes it in at the start; draining it well and adding it with the last turn instead will keep it from weeping liquid and scorching.
- Celery rootIf using celeriac rather than celery stalks, it should be cooked and diced first, as the original specifies. Raw celeriac will not soften in the time the potatoes take to brown.
- YieldFour modest side servings, or two as a supper dish with eggs.
Vegetable hash of this kind belongs to a long American tradition of turning cold boiled potatoes into a second meal, but the pimento marks the date: canned Spanish pimientos, and later ones grown commercially in Georgia, became a cheap pantry staple in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the 1920s scatter them through everything from cheese spreads to creamed chicken for a spot of red. What is notable here is the method: the potatoes are browned in a hot oven and repeatedly turned, rather than pressed into a skillet and crusted on the stovetop. It is also, incidentally, meatless without announcing itself.