Hash
Cold Left-over Beef Cold Boiled Potatoes Salt and Pepper Chop very fine, season, add a little warm water. Put in frying pan and cook slowly about twenty minutes.
Bay Leaves Cloves, Salt, Vinegar Crust of Brown Bread 2 Tablespoons Barley Flour Butter Substitute Put some drippings in bottom of pot, then the meat; cover with water. Put in the onions, pepper corns, cloves, bay leaves, carrot, bread crust, salt and a little vinegar. Keep the pot well covered; fill up with more hot water if it boils down. Let boil three hours, then blend the flour with butter substitute a nice brown; thin with gravy and let it boil up once more with the meat. Put the beef in a deep dish and strain the gravy over it. Add vinegar to taste.
Serve with fried potatoes and red cabbage.
Two separate recipes have run together on this page: a simple skillet hash of leftover beef and potatoes, and a longer braised beef in sour gravy that clearly belongs to a second entry. Read the break at "Bay Leaves" as the start of a new dish.
- The hash is the first four lines onlyCold beef, cold boiled potatoes, salt, pepper, a little warm water, twenty minutes in the pan. Everything from "Bay Leaves" onward is a braise that needs a pot, not a frying pan.
- Missing from the second ingredient listThe method calls for onions, a carrot and peppercorns that were never listed, and gives no quantity of beef. Figure on a 3-4 lb chuck or bottom round, two onions, one carrot, a teaspoon of peppercorns.
- Butter substituteMargarine or vegetable shortening, used when butter was scarce or costly. Butter works, though it browns and burns faster than the hydrogenated substitutes of the period.
- Barley flourAnother substitution, this time for wheat. It thickens less firmly than wheat flour and gives a slightly nutty, cloudy gravy. Two tablespoons of all-purpose flour is a straight swap if you want the older texture.
- The brown bread crustNot a garnish. A dark bread crust softens into the braising liquid and adds body and colour, as bread or gingerbread does in some German sauerbraten. The recipe does not specify which brown bread; a firm dark loaf works better than soft sandwich bread.
- Cooking slowly"Cook slowly about twenty minutes" for the hash means medium-low heat, undisturbed for stretches, so a crust forms on the bottom. Constant stirring gives you seasoned mush.
- Three hours boilingA hard boil for three hours will shred the meat and cloud the gravy. Bring it up, then hold at a bare simmer, covered, and start checking a chuck roast at two hours.
- Vinegar twiceVinegar goes in at the start and again at the end, after straining. The second addition is the one that sets the balance, so add it off the heat and taste as you go.
- YieldNo quantities are given for either dish. Judging by the suggested amounts above, the hash would stretch to two or three servings and the braise to about six with the cabbage and potatoes.
Both recipes here are frugal by design, and the second one carries the marks of wartime substitution: barley flour instead of wheat, "butter substitute" instead of butter, and a bread crust doing work that flour would otherwise do. Substitutions of this kind were promoted in the United States during the First World War, when households were urged to conserve wheat, fats and sugar, though similar advice circulated in the Second World War, and the book's date is not established here. The braise is a plain German-style pot roast in the sauerbraten family, soured with vinegar, thickened in part with bread crust and served with red cabbage; dishes of this type turn up in American community cookbooks shaped by German-American cooks. The hash above it needs no such pedigree: chopped cold roast and boiled potatoes fried together is a common nineteenth-century answer to leftover meat in English-language cookbooks.