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Beef Hash, Colbert
Pick off all the meat from the roast left over from yesterday and remove all the fat. Cut into small dice pieces; cut also three cold boiled potatoes into same shape and keep both on a plate.
Finely chop one small white onion and a small green pepper and fry in a small saucepan, with a tablespoon butter, to a light brown; then add the beef and potatoes. Moisten with half pint broth and half gill demi-glace. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Mix well. Cook for five minutes on the range. Cover the pan and set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove to the oven door.
Put two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon vinegar and teaspoon salt, in a saucepan. Crack in six fresh eggs and boil for three minutes; lift them up with a skimmer. Dress the hash on a hot dish, arrange eggs on top, sprinkle half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A leftover-roast hash built on French lines: demi-glace instead of gravy, poached eggs on top. The measurements are Delmonico's-era professional shorthand.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of demi-glace. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making "two saltspoons white pepper" a scant 1/2 teaspoon.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown sauce, and the reason this reads as a restaurant dish rather than a diner one. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; failing that, reduce a cup of strong beef stock to a quarter cup, which gives body if not the same gloss.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the cook was expected to judge the heat. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a covered pan meant to hold and meld for thirty minutes rather than brown.
- The covered half hourThis is the hinge. The hash goes in wet, with broth and demi-glace, and comes out bound but not dry. Leave the lid off and the liquid boils away and the beef turns dry and stringy.
- "Remove to the oven door"This appears to mean simply parking the pan somewhere warm while the eggs cook. A low oven or a turned-off burner does the same.
- The eggsTwo quarts of water with vinegar and salt, eggs cracked straight in for three minutes, is poaching, not boiling. Keep the water at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil, or the whites shred.
- Green pepperIn 1906 this means a sweet bell pepper, not a chilli. Use half a small one, finely chopped, so it softens in the same time as the onion.
- YieldSix eggs suggests six portions. Scale the eggs to the meat you actually have left over.
The International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's tradition, and this recipe shows the house habit of dressing thrift in French clothing: yesterday's roast, three cold potatoes, and then a spoonful of demi-glace to make it worth a menu line. The suffix Colbert belongs to the nineteenth-century French practice of naming garnishes for statesmen, in this case Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister; sauce Colbert and dishes à la Colbert are generally traced to that convention rather than to any documented connection with the man. In classical usage à la Colbert most often signals a meat glaze enriched with butter and parsley, and the parsley finish and demi-glace here are consistent with it, though kitchens of the period applied such names loosely. What is certain is the wider context: hash made from the joint was a fixture of American and English households alike, and the difference between a boarding-house hash and this one is a quarter cup of brown sauce and a poached egg.