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Tomato Hash
Butter the dish well; put in a layer of sliced tomatoes, a layer of cold meat, sliced thin; then a layer of bread and butter, and so on until the dish is full, seasoning well with pepper and salt, and beaten eggs poured over the top. Bake brown.
This is a layered leftovers bake rather than a hash in the chopped-and-fried sense, and the original assumes you know what cold roast meat and stale bread behave like. The points below fill in the numbers the text leaves out.
- Oven and timingNo temperature or time is given; "Bake brown" is the only doneness cue. A moderate oven, roughly 350-375F, for about 40-50 minutes should brown the top and set the egg; a knife slid into the middle should come out clean rather than wet.
- The dishA buttered 8- or 9-inch baking dish about 2 inches deep, or a 1 1/2-quart casserole. Butter it generously as instructed, since the tomato juice will otherwise weld the bottom layer in place.
- Quantities are left to youNo amounts are given at all. For a 1 1/2-quart dish, figure roughly 1 1/2 lb tomatoes, 12 oz cold cooked meat, four or five slices of bread with butter, and three beaten eggs. The original names no liquid but the eggs themselves.
- Tomato waterThe main risk is a soupy result. Slice the tomatoes 1/4 inch thick, salt them, drain 15 minutes, and blot before layering; in winter, drained canned tomatoes work but need the same treatment.
- Cold meatLeftover roast beef, lamb, ham or chicken, sliced thin. Because the meat is already cooked, the bake is really about setting the eggs and browning the top, not cooking the protein through.
- BreadDay-old bread, buttered on one side and laid butter-side up in each layer, holds its structure; fresh soft sandwich bread collapses into paste. Reserve one buttered layer for the top so it crisps.
- The eggsPour the beaten egg slowly over the assembled dish and let it stand five minutes so it works down between the layers before baking, otherwise it sets as a lid on top and the interior stays loose.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, and nothing else in the original. A little dry mustard or grated cheese between layers would not be out of place if the meat is bland, though the recipe does not call for it.
- YieldServes four as a supper dish with a green salad. It reheats acceptably but the bread softens.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the wave of North American charity cookbooks of the 1870s, compiled from contributions by "ladies" of a city and sold to fund a local institution; recipes like this one circulated by neighbourly exchange rather than professional authorship, which is why so many arrive without a single measurement. "Hash" in nineteenth-century usage was often applied loosely to dishes built from cooked meat left over from a joint, and the word carried no shame: managing yesterday's roast was a central skill in a household that bought meat in large pieces and had no refrigeration beyond a cool cellar or an icebox. What is described here is closer to what the same era would call a scallop, layers bound with egg and browned, and it reflects the growing acceptance of tomatoes as an ordinary summer vegetable in American kitchens, having shed the suspicion that clung to them earlier in the century.