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Hashed Corned Beef
Slice a couple of onions and brown well on a saucepan with a lump of butter, and add some well cooked corned beef chopped fine, and four chopped potatoes. Moisten with a teacupful each of Spanish sauce and broth, seasoning with pepper and nutmeg. Cook for fifteen minutes, stirring well all the time. Serve in a dish with poached eggs laid on top, sprinkling over with chopped fried parsley.
A restaurant hash built on brown sauce rather than cream or gravy, which is what gives it its depth. The only genuinely awkward item is the Spanish sauce.
- Spanish sauceOscar means sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of veal stock, browned mirepoix and roux, which a hotel kitchen of this size would have had standing. A cup of well-reduced beef stock thickened with a brown roux, or a good demi-glace loosened with stock, stands in for it.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is an unstandardised measure, somewhere between about 4 and 6 fluid ounces, so figure 1/2 to 3/4 cup each of sauce and broth. Judge by the pan: the hash should be moist and bound, not soupy.
- The potatoesFour chopped potatoes will not cook through in fifteen minutes of stirring. Use potatoes already boiled or steamed and cooled, cut in small dice.
- Corned beef"Well cooked" means simmered until fully tender before it goes near the pan; a modern flat-cut brisket needs three hours or so. About a pound of cooked meat suits this quantity of potato and onion.
- Stir, do not crustThis is not a griddle hash with a browned bottom. The instruction to stir the whole fifteen minutes is deliberate, and keeps the sauce from catching and the mixture loose enough to spoon.
- NutmegA restrained grating, not a spoonful. Nutmeg was a common seasoning in French brown sauces, and reads as savory rather than sweet at small doses.
- Fried parsleyWhole flat sprigs, dried thoroughly, dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop sputtering and turn brittle, then drained and chopped. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- YieldThe quantities suggest about four, with an egg apiece. Poach the eggs while the hash finishes so they arrive still soft.
Corned beef hash is a thrift dish, the second life of a boiled brisket, but this version shows what a large hotel kitchen did with leftovers: it reaches for a sauce espagnole the kitchen already had standing and finishes the plate with poached eggs and fried parsley, turning a plain dish into something a guest would order. The name has nothing to do with Spain in any direct sense; sauce espagnole is one of the classified French mother sauces, and the Spanish attribution is traditional and much argued over, usually linked to the browned tone of the sauce or to Spanish cooks in French service. "Corned" refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used in the cure. Recipes of this kind assumed a standing stock of prepared sauces, which is why they read so telegraphically to a home cook working from a bare kitchen.