Home › Left-Over Beef › Twentieth-Century Hash
Twentieth-Century Hash
Have baked six medium-sized potatoes. With a spoon carefully remove the potato, leaving rest of skin unbroken. Season the potato with one tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful of cream or milk, one teaspoonful of salt, and a little pepper, stirring lightly with a fork, but do not mash the potato. Add one cup of any kind of well-seasoned chopped beef that has been moistened with a little gravy, stock, or Worcestershire sauce. Fill the skins with this mixture, letting it rise a little above the top. Put a piece of butter on each and heat in oven. Grated cheese may be used instead of meat.
1/2 teaspoonful salt About 1/2 cup of milk Surprise Biscuits (with Beef) 2 tablespoonfuls short- I½ 1/2 cups flour ening 3 teaspoonfuls baking-powder teaspoonful salt About cup of milk Make a biscuit dough as soft as can be handled, pat it lightly, roll into a thin sheet, and cut with a biscuit cutter. Have ready one cup of wellseasoned minced beef that has been moistened with a little gravy, stock, or milk. Form into sandwiches by spreading the meat lightly on half of the biscuits and cover with the other half, pressing them together at the edges. Bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. This amount will make nine goodsized sandwiches. A brown gravy may be poured over them if desired. Serve hot.
Stuffed Peppers (with Beef) Parboil four to six green peppers for five minutes. Prepare a mixture of cooked rice and rare I2 roast beef or steak, seasoned and chopped fine.
Moisten with a little brown sauce (see page 68) made from soup stock. Stuff the peppers with this mixture and put buttered bread-crumbs on top. Place in a baking-pan and bake about twenty minutes in a moderate oven, basting with water and butter-one tablespoonful of butter to half a cup of hot water-as they cook. Serve on small pieces of toast and pour the remaining brown sauce around.
Stuffed Cabbage (with Beef) with Brown Sauce Use Savoy cabbage. Wash it and put in boiling water for five minutes to allow the leaves to open.
Chop and season the remnants of rare roast beef and put the meat between the leaves of the cabbage. Tie the cabbage carefully to retain the shape. Have ready two cups of brown sauce (see page 68) and add to it two tablespoonfuls of vinegar and a few slices of carrot and onion. Put the cabbage in the sauce, and cook very slowly about three hours. Baste occasionally.
Four separate ways to use up cold roast beef, run together by the scanner into one block. Read them as four recipes, not one, and note that the biscuit ingredient list has lost some of its fractions in the original printing.
- The hinge: don't mash the potatoThe instruction to stir with a fork and stop short of mashing is the whole point of the first dish. Baked potato flesh worked smooth turns gluey; kept in loose flakes it stays light under the meat.
- Oven temperatures"Hot oven" for the Surprise Biscuits is conventionally read as about 425-450F. "Moderate" for the stuffed peppers is about 350F. The refilled potatoes are given no oven term at all: the book says only "heat in oven," so heat them until hot through.
- The biscuit measurementsThe list reads 2 tablespoonfuls shortening, 1 1/2 cups flour, 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder, salt, and "about cup of milk." The salt is probably 1/2 teaspoon; the milk fraction is anyone's guess, somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup. Both fractions are genuinely lost in the printing, so add milk gradually until the dough is as soft as you can still handle.
- ShorteningIn this period the word meant lard, or a compounded vegetable fat. Cold butter cut into the flour works and tastes better; keep it cold and handle the dough as little as possible.
- Baking powderPeriod baking powder was often single-acting, so doughs went into the oven at once. Modern double-acting powder gives you a few minutes' grace, but there is still no reason to let cut biscuits stand.
- Savoy cabbage, three hoursThree hours of slow braising will reduce a stuffed Savoy to a very soft parcel. Ninety minutes at a bare simmer gives a cabbage that still holds together when you cut the string. Tie it in two directions, like a parcel, or the leaves open in the pot.
- Rare roast beefTwo of the four dishes specify rare beef, and for good reason: it will be cooked again. Beef already well done goes dry and stringy on reheating, so if that is what you have, be generous with the gravy or stock used to moisten it.
- Brown sauceThe recipe sends you to a brown sauce on page 68, made, it says, from soup stock. A cup of good stock thickened with a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked to a brown roux, simmered ten minutes, stands in for it.
- YieldThe recipe states six stuffed potatoes, nine biscuit sandwiches, and four to six peppers; the cabbage is a single stuffed head and gives no yield.
"Twentieth-Century Hash" reads as a wry title: hash was a byword for dull leftovers, and stuffing it back into the potato skin made the same economy presentable. Cookbooks devoted entirely to left-overs were a recognisable category in the first decades of the century, when middle-class households were losing servants and gaining an interest in domestic science, and waste had become a moral as well as a financial failing. All four dishes here follow one method: chop cold meat fine, moisten it so it does not read as dry, and hide it inside something else -- a skin, a biscuit, a pepper, a cabbage. The Worcestershire sauce offered as a moistener is doing familiar work; it had been made commercially in England since the 1830s and was widely used to give reheated meat some savoury depth.