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Vegetable Hash
Chop turnips, cabbage, beets, carrots, and onions, one or all, with cold boiled potatoes; season, moisten with little milk or gravy, and brown quickly in hot bacon fat, butter, or dripping.
A one-sentence recipe that assumes you already have a bowl of cooked vegetables in the larder. The details it leaves out are the ones that decide whether you get a browned cake or a grey mash.
- Keep the potato in chargePotato should be at least half the volume; it supplies the starch that binds everything and takes the crust. Beets, cabbage and turnip all carry water and will steam the pan if they outnumber it.
- Chop, do not mashRough quarter-inch dice throughout. Uniform pieces brown at the same rate, and anything reduced to purée will stick and scorch before a crust forms.
- Dry the vegetables firstCold boiled vegetables hold surface water. Blot them, and if you are using cabbage, squeeze it. Wet hash never browns.
- "Moisten with little milk or gravy"The original gives no quantity; a couple of tablespoons to a quart of chopped vegetables is about the limit before it turns wet. It is there to bind the crumb of the potato, not to make a sauce.
- Dripping and bacon fatDripping is the strained fat from a roast, kept in a crock; bacon fat is the poured-off frying fat. Either works, and both bring seasoning of their own, so salt at the end. A neutral oil browns just as well but tastes flatter.
- "Brown quickly in hot fat"Get the fat shimmering, spread the hash in an even layer in a heavy or cast-iron pan, then leave it alone for six to eight minutes before turning. Constant stirring is what produces the disappointing version.
- Beets change the dishInclude beets and everything turns magenta and sweeter — this is essentially red flannel hash. If you want the vegetables to stay distinct in colour, brown the beets separately and fold them in at the end.
- YieldAbout a quart of chopped vegetables serves three as a supper dish, two if it is the whole meal. A fried or poached egg on top is the usual accompaniment.
Hash is one of the oldest working answers to the problem this whole book addresses: the word comes from the French hacher, to chop, and by the nineteenth century it named any dish of cut cooked food refried with fat and a binder. American cookbooks of the period treat meat hash as the default and vegetable hash as the thriftier cousin, made on the days when the joint was already finished. Left-over cookery had a small publishing boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by domestic-science writers who argued that waste in the kitchen was both an economic and a moral failure, and books like this one are essentially inventories of what a household could be expected to have sitting cold in the pantry. The beet-heavy version of the dish survives in New England as red flannel hash, generally traced to the same habit of frying up whatever the boiled dinner left behind.