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Hashed Brown Potatoes
Boil in a quart of water with a teaspoon salt six medium-sized potatoes for thirty-five minutes. Peel, let cool off and them chop them very fine. Heat a tablespoon butter or good fat in a frying pan and add the potatoes. Season with a teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Gently toss them in the pan while cooking on a brisk fire for ten minutes. Give them an omelet shape and let them get a nice golden colour, which will require five or six minutes. Turn them on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward potato cake, but the seasoning measures and the fat quantity both read oddly to a modern cook. A few notes before you start.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is a lot of pepper by current taste; start with half and adjust.
- Salt, twice overA teaspoon goes into the cooking water and another teaspoon into the pan. Since the potatoes are boiled in their skins, very little of the first teaspoon gets in, but the second seasons only six potatoes and will taste sharp. Half a teaspoon in the pan is closer to modern seasoning.
- Cool them properlyThis is the hinge. Potatoes boiled and then chopped while still warm turn gluey and will not brown. Boil them the day before if you can and refrigerate overnight; cold, dry, firm potato is what gives you a crust.
- "Chop very fine"A knife, not a grater and not a ricer. You want small irregular pieces that can knit together in the pan. Grated potato behaves quite differently and produces a rosti rather than this.
- One tablespoon of fatThin by any standard for six potatoes in a frying pan. Two to three tablespoons of butter, clarified butter or a neutral oil is more realistic, and a well-seasoned cast-iron or heavy nonstick pan will save you the difference.
- "A brisk fire"Medium-high heat. The ten minutes of tossing dries the potatoes and starts the colour; resist stirring in the last five or six minutes or the crust will never set.
- "Omelet shape"Press the potatoes into a rough oval cake in the pan, as you would fold an omelette over, and leave it alone to brown on the underside. Slide it onto the plate browned face up rather than trying to flip it in the air.
- YieldSix medium potatoes serves four as a side dish, or two or three at breakfast alongside eggs.
Hashed brown potatoes are an American breakfast and hotel-restaurant dish, the name simply describing the method: potato hashed with a knife and browned in fat. Nineteenth-century cookbooks also list "hashed potatoes" or "hashed browned potatoes" as a way of using cold boiled potatoes left from a previous meal, which is consistent with a technique that starts with boiling and cooling rather than with raw potato. Its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book alongside French, German and Italian material reflects a period habit of treating hotel-kitchen standards as a common international repertoire rather than as national dishes.