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Hashed Mutton and Fried Eggs
Cut some cold mutton into nicely-shaped pieces, removing the fat and brown skin; put them in a stewpan with some well-seasoned gravy and warm. When very hot stir some canned or freshly-peeled tomatoes in with them, place the hash on a hot dish, garnish around with fried eggs and small croutons of bread that have been fried in butter, and serve.
Hashed Mutton, Zingara Style Chop up two onions and fry them in a saucepan with an ounce of butter for three minutes; add one and one-half pounds of hashed mutton, and one-fourth the quantity of hashed cooked potatoes. Season with salt and pepper to taste, adding a little nutmeg if desired; put in also two raw tomatoes cut up, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley and a crushed clove of garlic; also a gill each of Spanish sauce and broth. Mix all together and cook for twenty minutes, then serve with a little chopped parsley sprinkled over the whole.
Two hashes for leftover roast mutton, written when a Sunday joint routinely fed a household for three days. Both depend on meat that is already cooked and on sauce doing the seasoning work.
- MuttonTrue mutton — sheep over a year, often much older — is sold now mainly by halal butchers and specialty farms. Leftover roast lamb shoulder or leg is the practical substitute, though it is milder and less fatty.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The Zingara hash therefore takes 1/2 cup Spanish sauce and 1/2 cup broth for 1 1/2 lb of meat, which is a moist hash rather than a wet stew.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: brown stock thickened with a dark roux, with tomato and browned mirepoix. In a modern kitchen a well-reduced brown gravy or a good demi-glace does the same job. The "well-seasoned gravy" of the first version is the same idea, and should already taste finished before the meat goes in.
- The hinge: warm, do not simmerThe meat is already cooked. In the first hash it needs only to heat through in the gravy — held at a boil it goes dry and stringy. The twenty minutes given for the Zingara version is for the onions, potatoes and tomatoes to come together; keep it at a bare simmer and add a splash of broth if it tightens.
- Cutting the meat"Nicely-shaped pieces" means neat slices or small blocks cut across the grain, not shreds. "Hashed" in the second recipe means chopped by hand to a rough dice — a food processor turns cooked lamb to paste.
- TomatoesRaw tomatoes cut up will release a good deal of water. Canned crushed tomatoes, drained, give a more reliable result out of season; either way taste for acidity, since the sauce is already salted.
- Fried eggs and croutonsFry the eggs in butter with set whites and liquid yolks, so the yolk runs into the hash. The croutons should go on at the last moment or they soften.
- YieldThe Zingara hash, at 1 1/2 lb of meat plus about 6 oz of potato, serves four generously. The first version scales to whatever cold meat is on hand; figure 5 to 6 oz of meat and one egg per person.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, published his Cook Book in 1896, and a great deal of it is given over to the systematic use of cold meat — hashes, croquettes, minces and rechauffés, which is what a large hotel kitchen and a large household had in common. "Zingara" is a French kitchen name for a garnish or sauce in the so-called gypsy style (Italian zingara, gypsy), generally traced to the nineteenth-century repertory and usually involving tomato, garlic, paprika or ham; Escoffier later codified a Zingara sauce along similar lines. The fried-egg garnish suggests a breakfast or luncheon dish rather than a dinner course, at a period when mutton was still a common roasting meat on British and, to a lesser extent, American tables — a preference that has since shifted decisively towards lamb.