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Turkey Hash with Clams
Detach all meat from the turkey left over from yesterday and cut in quarter-inch pieces. Plunge twenty-four freshly opened small clams in a pint of boiling water three minutes, drain, then cut each in quarters. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a saucepan, add one seedless chopped green pepper and six finely chopped shallots and brown three minutes, pour in a pint milk, and as soon as it comes to a boil add the turkey, clams, and one finely chopped, cold, boiled potato. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg, lightly mix and cook twelve minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add one gill cream and a half ounce good butter, mix well, cook five minutes more, pour into a hot dish and serve.
A leftover-turkey supper dish from the era when clams were cheap and every scrap of the bird was accounted for. Most of the work is in the timing of the shellfish.
- Clams go in lastAs written the clams are blanched three minutes, then simmered another seventeen in the milk. Small hard-shell clams turn to erasers after about two minutes of heat. Fold them in during the final minute or two and let the residual heat finish them.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning is 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. A gill is half a cup, here of cream.
- Twenty-four small clamsLittlenecks or Manila clams, about 2 lb in the shell, yielding roughly a cup of meat. Save the liquor from opening them and use it in place of some of the milk; the recipe throws away a great deal of flavour when it drains them.
- ShallotsAmerican usage of this period was sometimes loose, and "shallots" could stand for what a greengrocer sold as green onions, though a Delmonico's-trained cook may well have meant the true thing. Six real shallots, finely chopped, is a lot of allium for a pint of milk but not unreasonable; six scallions gives a lighter result.
- Don't brown the aromatics hard"Brown three minutes" in a tablespoon of butter over moderate heat means softened and lightly coloured. Scorched shallot in milk reads as bitter.
- The milk will want watchingA pint of milk simmered twelve minutes with potato in it can catch and scorch. Keep it at a bare simmer on a heavy pan and stir up from the bottom; the potato is there to thicken as it breaks down.
- Turkey is already cookedQuarter-inch dice of cooked leg and breast need only to heat through. The twelve minutes is for the sauce, not the meat.
- YieldProbably about four as a supper dish, though the recipe leaves the amount of turkey open. Good on toast, in a shallow bowl, or spooned over split biscuits.
Turkey hash was one of the standard answers to the day after a holiday bird, and combining it with shellfish fits an Atlantic-coast habit of using clams as a seasoning rather than a centrepiece — the same instinct that puts salt pork and clams in a chowder. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) collected a great many of these short, dictated-sounding entries; Filippini had spent years at Delmonico's in New York. The green pepper, cayenne and nutmeg may hint at a Creole-inflected seasoning, though that combination was widespread. The dish is essentially a creamed hash, a form that appeared often on American breakfast and supper tables.