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Turkey Hash on Toast
Pick off all the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday and mince it into small dice pieces. Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon butter, adding one finely chopped green pepper, and cook for five minutes; then add two tablespoons flour; briskly stir, moisten with one and a half gills hot milk and one gill cold cream; briskly whisk it up, and as soon as it comes to a boil add the turkey. Season with a teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well with a wooden spoon and cook for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Equally divide the hash on six freshly prepared toasts and serve.
A leftover-turkey cream hash of the kind that filled the day-after-a-roast column in nearly every early twentieth-century book. The measurements are the only real obstacle.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. One and a half gills of hot milk is 3/4 cup; one gill of cold cream is 1/2 cup, for 1 1/4 cups of liquid in total.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That means 1/4 teaspoon cayenne, which is assertive for six servings, and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. Start with half of each and adjust at the end.
- SaltA full teaspoon is a lot of salt for this quantity. If your bird was brined or shop-roasted, salt only after the sauce has thickened.
- How much turkeyThe recipe assumes whatever came off the carcass. About 3 cups of diced meat suits this quantity of sauce; much more and it will be dry, much less and it becomes soup.
- The rouxOne tablespoon butter to two tablespoons flour is a lean, flour-heavy roux and will look dry once the pepper has given up its moisture. Cook it a full minute before the milk goes in, and add the liquid gradually or it will lump.
- Green pepperA whole chopped bell pepper in one tablespoon of butter is a tight fit; five minutes over moderate heat softens it without browning, which is what is wanted here.
- The ten minutesThe meat is already cooked, so the ten minutes is for thickening and marrying the flavours, not for the turkey. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir often; a hard boil at that flour ratio will scorch on the bottom.
- Toast timingMake the toast at the last moment as the recipe says. Cream hash soaks through in a couple of minutes, so plate and serve immediately.
- YieldSix slices, enough for six as a light lunch or supper dish, or three or four as a main course.
Hash on toast belongs to the frugal side of the American table, where the second appearance of a roast mattered as much as the first. Filippini's book treats the day-after turkey as a fixed institution rather than a suggestion: the opening line assumes yesterday's bird without explanation. What marks this version as restaurant-trained rather than plain household cooking is the technique underneath it, a small béchamel enriched with cold cream and seasoned with nutmeg and cayenne, the same pairing that flavoured creamed chicken, sweetbreads and oyster dishes across the period. The green pepper is the American note; sweet peppers turn up frequently in United States cookbooks of these decades in dishes that would otherwise be strictly French, and here it does the work that mushrooms or truffle would have done in a Paris kitchen.