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Chicken Hash
1½ cups cold chopped cup boiled potatoes chicken to cup chicken gravy Cut the potatoes in small pieces. Mix together, season highly, and moisten with the chicken gravy.
Butter some ramekins or small bowls, put in the mixture, covering the top with a very thin layer of fine buttered crumbs. Sprinkle a teaspoonful of milk over the crumbs, and on the top of each ramekin lay a slice of raw tomato. A bit of butter on the tomato helps to brown it. Bake for about fifteen minutes in a hot oven. The tomato should be soft and the crumbs well browned.
A gratin of chopped chicken and potato baked in individual dishes, finished with buttered crumbs and a tomato slice. The method is sound; the quantities in the ingredient line need a cook's judgement.
- ProportionsThe ingredient line as printed runs the columns together and the amounts for potato and gravy are not recoverable. Work to about 1½ cups chopped cooked chicken to 1 cup diced boiled potato, moistened with roughly ½ cup gravy — enough to bind, not to make it soupy.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in books of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 400–450°F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for browning crumbs and softening a tomato slice; the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- RamekinsAny 6–8 oz ovenproof dish works. Butter them well: the potato starch will weld to a bare dish. The recipe as gauged above fills four.
- Season highlyThis is the hinge. Cold chicken and boiled potato are both bland, and the gravy is doing double duty as sauce and seasoning. Salt, pepper, and a little onion or celery salt should be added before the mixture goes into the dishes, and tasted.
- The gravyIf no chicken gravy survives from the roast, a thin velouté from stock and a butter-flour roux answers. Plain stock alone will not bind, and the hash will bake dry and loose.
- Crumbs and milk"Fine buttered crumbs" in this period usually means dry crumbs tossed with melted butter rather than fresh ones. The teaspoon of milk sprinkled over presumably keeps them from scorching before the tomato softens; the recipe does not say.
- The tomatoCut the slice on the thick side or it may collapse into the crumbs. A hard, underripe tomato is unlikely to soften much in fifteen minutes.
Cook books devoted to left-overs were a small industry in American and British publishing from the 1890s through the 1920s, addressed to households that roasted a whole bird and then faced it for three days. Hash — meat chopped fine, extended with potato, bound with gravy — was the standard answer, and its reputation as drudgery food is exactly what this recipe is trying to escape. Baking the mixture in individual ramekins rather than turning it out of a skillet, and crowning each with a tomato slice, borrows the presentation of the restaurant gratin to make thrift look deliberate. The technique is the same one behind coquilles and scalloped dishes of the era: portion it, cover it with buttered crumbs, brown it hard, and it arrives at the table as a course rather than a remainder.