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Liver-and-Bacon Hash
Chop any cold cooked liver, and season with salt and pepper. Crush a few slices of cold, crisp bacon and add to it. To every cup of liver allow four tablespoonfuls of cooked rice, or any coarse cereal, and mix lightly together. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter or drippings in a frying-pan, add one-quarter cup of tomatoes, and turn in the meat mixture. Cover and simmer slowly until well heated. Serve on a hot platter, and garnish with nicely browned potato cakes.
A thrift dish built from three leftovers at once — liver, bacon and cooked grain — bound with just enough tomato to keep it from drying out. The proportions are elastic, but the moisture is not.
- The hinge: keep it moist and briefCooked liver toughens fast on reheating. Cover the pan, keep the heat low, and pull it off as soon as it is hot through — five to eight minutes. Anything longer and the liver turns grainy.
- "One-quarter cup of tomatoes"Most likely canned tomatoes with their juice, which were common pantry stock by this period. Chopped canned tomatoes work directly; fresh tomato needs a spoonful of water or stock added, since the point is liquid, not fruit.
- "Any coarse cereal"In this period that meant leftover breakfast porridge — hominy grits, cracked wheat, oatmeal or barley. Use whatever is cooked and cold; hominy and barley hold their texture best, oatmeal will melt into the mixture and thicken it.
- DrippingsBacon fat is the obvious choice and keeps the flavour consistent. Butter browns faster over the low heat this needs, so watch it if you go that way.
- Which liverCalf's or beef liver from a previous meal is the likeliest candidate; the recipe does not specify. Chicken livers work but are much softer — chop them coarsely or they will collapse into paste.
- Proportion and yieldOne cup of chopped liver plus 4 tablespoons of grain makes two modest servings. Scale by the cup; the tomato and fat scale with it.
- Potato cakesProbably leftover mashed potato patted into flat rounds and fried. They are doing the work of a starch side, not decoration.
- SeasoningLiver and bacon are both assertive but the tomato flattens them. Taste at the end and expect to want more pepper, and possibly a little mustard or vinegar.
Liver was among the cheapest meats in the American market at the turn of the century, and this recipe belongs to a genre of household writing that treated the second appearance of a food as a test of the cook's skill rather than an embarrassment. The addition of cooked cereal is characteristic — leftover porridge from breakfast was a standing surplus in households that cooked oatmeal or hominy every morning, and stretching meat with it was common practice long before wartime rationing made the habit official. Hash itself takes its name from the French hacher, to chop, and by 1900 the word covered almost any chopped, reheated, pan-bound mixture.