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Beef Hash, Ecossaise
Pick all the meat off beef left over from yesterday, then cut it in quarter-inch-square pieces. Cut also into same shape two cold boiled potatoes and keep both on a plate.
Thoroughly heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add a half finely chopped green pepper, a chopped onion and two ounces raw lean salt pork cut in small pieces, gently brown for five minutes, stirring meanwhile, then add beef and potatoes. Moisten with three gills broth season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, saltspoon grated nutmeg, tablespoon Worcestershire sauce and mix well. Cover pan and set to bake in oven for forty-five minutes, then remove. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in a black frying pan, add hash, give it an omelette form, then brown for ten minutes, turn on hot dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A leftover-beef hash that is stewed in broth before it is browned, which is what gives it a soft interior under a crust. Two stages, two pans, and the browning is where it succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: brown it undisturbedAfter the oven stage the hash is packed into a buttered pan, shaped like a folded omelette, and left alone for the full ten minutes over moderate heat. Poking or stirring at this point prevents the crust from setting and the shape will collapse when you turn it out.
- Three gills of brothA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups. That is a generous amount for roughly two cups of meat and two potatoes; it should be nearly absorbed by the end of the oven time, and if it is not, cook uncovered a few minutes more before browning.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Here it means a light grating of nutmeg, not a measured spoonful of the powdered stuff.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. In modern terms a covered pan of moistened hash suits a moderate oven, around 350F, for the stated 45 minutes; much hotter and the broth is likely to boil away before the time is up.
- Salt pork and saltTwo ounces of raw salt pork plus a full teaspoon of added salt plus Worcestershire is a lot of sodium for a small pan. Render the pork first, taste after the broth goes in, and hold back some of the salt.
- "A black frying pan"Cast iron or carbon steel, well seasoned. The instruction is about heat retention and release, not colour; a heavy skillet is the point, and a thin nonstick pan will not build the same crust.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and the amount of leftover beef is unspecified; two potatoes and three gills of broth point to a small dish. Scale the potatoes with the meat rather than the broth, or the hash turns soupy.
"Ecossaise" is simply French for Scottish, and in the grand-hotel kitchen vocabulary that this book draws on, such labels were shorthand rather than geography — a garnish or seasoning pattern assigned to a nation and then repeated across the menu. What marks this version out from an American corned-beef hash is the green pepper and the nutmeg, and above all the two-stage method: a covered braise in broth followed by a hard sear in a separate iron pan. The recipe begins "beef left over from yesterday."