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Turkey Hash with Green Peppers
Pick off all the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday. Cut it into small square pieces. Finely chop a green pepper and brown it with a tablespoon melted butter in a small frying pan for five minutes, then add one tablespoon flour; stir well, add the turkey, moisten with one and a half gills milk and one gill cream, season with three saltspoons salt and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and let gently boil for fifteen minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Remove, arrange six freshly prepared and well-trimmed toasts on a hot dish, evenly divide the hash over the six toasts and serve.
A leftover-turkey cream hash from the era when a roast bird was expected to feed the household for days. The measurements are the main obstacle; the method is straightforward.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup and one gill of cream is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three of them make 3/4 teaspoon salt, and the nutmeg is a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- What "green pepper" means hereAn unripe sweet bell pepper, not a chile. One medium pepper, finely chopped, is what the recipe assumes; it is there for its slight bitterness and colour rather than heat.
- Watch the fifteen-minute boilA tablespoon of butter and flour against 1 1/4 cups of liquid gives a thin sauce, and the long simmer is how it thickens. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir often, or the milk will catch on the pan bottom before the sauce sets.
- The turkey is already cookedIt only needs to heat through and take up the sauce. Fifteen minutes of hard boiling will string out the white meat; if your sauce is already at the consistency you want, pull the pan sooner.
- Cut size"Small square pieces" means roughly half-inch dice. Larger pieces sit awkwardly on toast and shed their sauce.
- Toast"Well-trimmed" most likely means the crusts cut away and the slices squared off. Use a firm white bread and toast it at the last moment so it does not soften under the sauce.
- YieldSix toasts, so six modest servings as a supper or luncheon dish. Roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of picked turkey meat will fill them.
Alexander Filippini, for many years associated with Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1906) around the assumption that a well-run house wasted nothing, and the opening line here — "the turkey left over from yesterday" — places the dish on the day after a holiday or a large dinner. Creamed leftover meat on trimmed toast was a common American answer to cooked meat in the late nineteenth century; the same white sauce carried chicken, veal and dried beef. The green pepper helps date it: sweet peppers appear to have spread from regional Southern and Creole cooking into wider American use in the decades around 1900, and Filippini, who collected dishes from across the country and abroad, uses them as a bright note in otherwise plain cream preparations. Nutmeg in a milk sauce is older still, a habit inherited from English and French white sauces that survives today in béchamel.