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Lamb Hash, Espagnole
Cut in small dice pieces all the meat from leg of lamb left over from yesterday's dinner and two medium, cold, boiled potatoes. Heat a tablespoon butter in saucepan, add one finely chopped, seeded, green pepper and one medium, chopped white onion, brown for five minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile, then add the lamb and potatoes. Peel and finely chop three sound, fresh, red tomatoes and add to the hash with two gills of broth. Season with light teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, mix well, cover pan, then set in the oven for forty-five minutes; remove, dress on a deep dish and serve.
A leftovers dish with a clear structure: brown the aromatics, add the cold meat and potato, moisten, and let the oven do the work. Two things need translating — the liquid measure and the missing oven temperature.
- Two gills of brothA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup of lamb or beef stock. It should just moisten the hash, not submerge it; the pan is covered, so very little evaporates.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for a dish carrying this much potato.
- No oven temperature givenThe book assumes you know. Use 350F. The pan is covered and everything in it is already cooked, so the forty-five minutes are about melding and reducing, not cooking through.
- Use an ovenproof panThe saucepan goes straight into the oven, so start in something with a metal handle and a tight lid — a small Dutch oven or a deep skillet with a cover.
- Green pepperHere this means an ordinary unripe bell pepper, seeded and chopped fine. Nothing hot is intended.
- TomatoesThree fresh red tomatoes, peeled and chopped, come to roughly a pound. Out of season, a cup of drained canned tomatoes gives a better result than pale fresh ones, and you can cut the broth slightly to compensate.
- Cut everything smallSmall dice throughout is the point. Meat cut coarsely stays as identifiable chunks of yesterday's roast rather than merging into the sauce.
- YieldThe meat off a leg of lamb varies enormously. Figure on about a pound of cooked meat feeding four as written, and adjust the potato and broth in proportion.
Espagnole on a menu of this period usually means one of two things: the brown mother sauce of French cookery, or simply "in the Spanish manner." This is plainly the second — the combination of green pepper, onion and tomato was often taken as shorthand for Spanish cooking in English and American kitchens, and the same trio turns up labelled Espagnole, Spanish, or à l'espagnole across dishes from omelettes to stewed rice. The International Cook Book is full of such national tags applied loosely to home cookery. What sits underneath the name is the older and more universal habit of the second-day hash: cold roast and cold boiled potatoes, chopped and re-cooked with something wet, out of yesterday's dinner.