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Beef Hash, Moreno
Cut meat from roast beef left over from yesterday in dice-shaped pieces. Cut in same shape half the quantity cold boiled potatoes. Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon melted butter, adding one finely chopped white onion and nicely brown five minutes. Add beef and potatoes, with four Spanish sweet peppers cut in small squares. Moisten with pint of broth. Season with light teaspoon salt and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, cover pan, and set in oven one hour. Remove, dress hash on a hot dish, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around the hash. Sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A leftovers dish from the era when a Sunday roast was expected to reappear twice more. The proportions are the thing to watch: a pint of broth against a modest amount of beef and potato makes this closer to a braise than a crisp skillet hash.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the coal ranges of the period carried no reliable gauge. A moderate oven, around 350F, with the pan covered is a reasonable modern reading.
- The liquid is the hingeIn a covered pan much of the pint of broth will still be there at the end, but a wide pan or a loose lid can leave you with either soup or a scorched bottom. Check at 30 and 45 minutes and add a splash more broth if it is drying, or uncover for the last quarter hour if it is swimming.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. A "light teaspoon" of salt is a scant one, and worth holding back if your broth is commercial and already salted.
- Spanish sweet peppersMost likely not fresh bell peppers but the preserved sweet red peppers then sold in tins, what a modern shop labels pimientos. Four of them is roughly a small jar, drained. Fresh roasted red pepper is the nearest substitute; raw bell pepper will taste green against the nutmeg.
- ProportionsHalf as much potato as beef, by volume of diced pieces. Cut both to about half an inch so they hold their shape through an hour of moist heat.
- ButterOne tablespoon is thin for browning an onion in a saucepan wide enough to hold everything. Two is more realistic, and the beef will contribute little fat of its own if the roast was lean.
- CroutonsCut from firm white bread with a small heart cutter or a knife, then fried in butter until golden. Make them while the hash is in the oven so they are crisp at the table; they soften within minutes of touching the dish.
Hash was the backbone of the nineteenth-century economical kitchen, and cookbooks of the period give dozens of versions distinguished chiefly by their garnish and their seasoning. This one carries a personal name, as many entries in international collections do — dishes were routinely credited to a chef, a patron or a hotel, and "Moreno" here reads as a Spanish note attached to the dish, though whom or what it referred to is not clear. Its markers are the tinned sweet peppers, often associated with Spain and sold in Europe and America as a bright, cheap way to lift plain meat, and the nutmeg, which was conventionally reached for in seasoning minced or hashed beef in the French-trained kitchens these books drew on. The heart-shaped croutons are pure hotel service: a way of presenting a plate of yesterday's roast as something a dining room could send out without apology.