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Corned-Beef-and-Beet Hash
Use about equal amounts of cooked corned beef and boiled potatoes, and a little less quantity of cooked beets. Chop all three separately. Mix and season with salt and pepper. Try out a few thin slices of fat salt pork until crisp, chop and add to mixture; use the fat (or part of it) in warming up the hash. Moisten with hot water.
Heat in hot frying-pan, turning often to keep it from sticking. This mixture may be formed into balls, rolled in flour, and then browned.
A red-flannel hash in all but name, and one of the few left-over dishes that improves on the original meal. The proportions are given by volume, not weight, and the method is forgiving.
- Proportions in practiceProportions are by volume, not weight: equal parts chopped corned beef and boiled potato, with somewhat less beet. Chopping the three separately matters: beet bleeds, and mixing at the end keeps the beef and potato from turning uniformly magenta.
- Fat salt porkSold as salt pork or streaky salt-cured belly; it is not bacon, having no smoke or sugar. Two or three thin slices give both the cracklings and about 2 tablespoons of rendered fat. Bacon or beef drippings substitute acceptably, though bacon adds smoke the original did not have.
- "Try out"Render slowly over medium-low heat until the pork is crisp and the fat has run clear, five to eight minutes. Rushing this scorches the fat and the whole pan tastes of it.
- Cold potatoes onlyCold potatoes -- Boiled potatoes are best thoroughly cold, ideally a day old, before chopping. Warm potato tends to turn gluey under the knife, and the hash is less likely to develop a crust.
- Moisten sparinglyA few tablespoons of hot water is enough. Too much and the hash steams rather than fries, and the crust that is the whole point of the dish never forms.
- Hot pan, less turningThe recipe's "turning often" is aimed at keeping the hash from sticking. On a modern burner you can press the hash flat in a hot heavy skillet and leave it three or four minutes at a stretch, then turn in sections; stirring constantly gives you warm mince.
- The croquette variationIf forming balls, the mixture must be fine-chopped and cool enough to hold together. Rolled in flour they can be browned in the reserved pork fat; they will not hold up to deep frying without egg and crumb.
- SaltCorned beef and salt pork are both cured. Season at the end, after tasting.
Corned beef, potato and beet fried together is better known in New England as red flannel hash, the name generally traced to the color the beet lends the whole pan. The dish is the tail end of a boiled dinner: corned beef simmered with potatoes, beets, cabbage and turnip, with whatever survived the table going into the skillet next morning. That sequence explains why the hash is treated as an afterthought to the beef rather than as a dish in its own right; nobody corned a brisket in order to make hash. "Corned" itself refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used in the dry cure.