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Hashed Brown Potatoes, Moreno
Finely chop six medium, cold peeled potatoes and three Spanish sweet peppers; heat tablespoon melted butter or good fat in a frying pan, add potatoes and peppers, season with teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and gently toss in pan while cooking on a brisk fire ten minutes. Roll up omelette form and let get a nice golden colour, turn on a hot dish and serve.
A pimiento-flecked hash browns from a 1929 hotel-style collection. The instructions compress two techniques into one paragraph, and the order matters more than the timing.
- The hinge: stop tossingTossing keeps the potatoes loose but prevents any crust from forming, and without a crust the cake will not roll. Toss for the first few minutes to coat and heat through, then press the potatoes into a flat cake and leave them undisturbed for four or five minutes until the underside sets before folding.
- Cold potatoes are cooked potatoesThe recipe assumes leftovers. Boil or steam six medium potatoes the day before, cool them fully, then peel and chop; warm boiled potatoes turn to paste under the knife and refuse to brown.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper for six potatoes. That is assertive by modern taste; start with half and adjust.
- Spanish sweet peppersThese are pimientos, sold today roasted and peeled in jars. Drain and pat them dry or the moisture will steam the potatoes instead of frying them. Three whole jarred pimientos, chopped, is about half a cup.
- FatOne tablespoon of butter for six potatoes is not enough to brown them in a modern pan. Use three or four tablespoons of butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil so the milk solids do not scorch over ten minutes of high heat.
- Brisk fireMedium-high on a modern burner. Use a well-seasoned cast iron or heavy nonstick pan of 10 inches; a thin pan will burn the crust before the interior is hot.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, or two as a supper. Slide it onto a warmed plate seam-side down and cut across into wedges.
"Moreno" here appears to be a garnish name rather than a place: in the grand-restaurant vocabulary of the early twentieth century, Spanish sweet peppers signalled a Spanish or Latin treatment. The technique itself is French in habit inu2014 handled like an omelette, folded and turned out golden — applied to what was by then a thoroughly American dish. Hashed brown potatoes appear in American cookbooks and hotel menus from the late nineteenth century onward as a way to use the previous day's boiled potatoes, and pimientos gave a cheap kitchen a flash of colour that photographed and plated well.