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Corned Beef Hash Au Gratin
2 cups chopped, corned beef 2 cups chopped, cooked potatoes Milk to moisten Mazola Coarse bread crumbs 1 small onion put through food chopper Combine the corned beef, potatoes and onion, or use one cup of potato, a second of chopped beets, carrots or cabbage that may be left over. Pour in enough milk to bind the mixture together and season to taste with salt and pepper. Thoroughly oil muffin pans with Mazola and dust with coarse bread crumbs. Pack in the hash, cover with coarse crumbs moistened with Mazola and bake in a hot oven, 375 degrees F.
A leftovers dish from a corn-oil promotional cookbook, baked in muffin tins so each portion gets a crust on all sides. The quantities are loose by design; the technique is the point.
- MazolaA brand of refined corn oil, still sold and unchanged in kind. Any neutral oil works, though the recipe exists to sell corn oil. Butter gives a better crumb crust if you are not bound by the original.
- The ovenThe book calls 375F a "hot oven," which is at the low end of that older term; treat it as written. Twenty-five to thirty-five minutes gives a browned top and crisp edges.
- Corned beef'Chopped' suggests a boiled or deli brisket cut up rather than canned, though the recipe does not say. Canned will work but is softer and saltier, so cut back the added salt.
- Milk to moistenAdd it a tablespoon or two at a time. The mixture should just hold together when pressed; wet hash steams rather than crisps and will not turn out of the tin.
- Coarse crumbsTorn or grated day-old bread, not fine dry crumbs, which pack into paste. Toss them with oil before they go on top so they brown evenly.
- Packing the tinsPress firmly into well-oiled, crumbed cups. Let the pans sit five minutes out of the oven before running a knife around each portion, or the crust tears away.
- YieldAbout eight to ten standard muffin cups, serving four at breakfast.
- The vegetable swapThe suggested beets, carrots or cabbage change the moisture considerably. Beets in particular release liquid and colour, so use less milk than you would with potato alone.
This comes from a corn-oil cookbook, one of a large family of manufacturer-published recipe booklets that circulated in American kitchens through the first half of the twentieth century, each written to demonstrate a single branded product in as many dishes as possible. Hash itself is far older, its name from the French hacher, to chop, and corned beef hash is often said to have been a Monday dish built from the boiled dinner of the day before, the "corn" referring to the coarse grains of salt used to cure the beef. What marks this version as modern for its period is the muffin pan: turning a skillet dish into individual moulded portions was a genteel touch that also solved the eternal hash problem of getting crust on more than one side. The offhand suggestion to substitute leftover beets, carrots or cabbage tells you the recipe was understood as a method rather than a formula.