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Hashed Browned Potatoes
3 cups pared, chopped, raw potatoes 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/4 cup Mazola Heat the Mazola in a medium-sized frying pan, add the potatoes mixed with the seasonings, packing them into a thin layer. Cover and cook slowly so they will steam through and gradually brown on the bottom. Allow fifteen to twenty minutes.
A straightforward covered-skillet hash brown that starts from raw potato rather than leftover boiled potato. The technique is sound; only a few details need translating.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now, and the branded ingredient the book was written to sell. Any neutral oil works, though a mix of oil and butter browns better. A quarter cup in a 9- or 10-inch pan is a generous slick, not a shallow fry, and it is what produces the crust.
- Quantity and yieldThree cups of chopped raw potato is roughly a pound, about two medium russets. That fills a 9-inch pan in the thin layer the recipe asks for and serves three at breakfast, two if it is the main plate.
- Raw, not leftoverThese are not boiled first, unlike many hash brown recipes. The cover is what cooks them through by trapping steam, so it has to stay on for most of the time or you will get browned outsides and chalky centers.
- The hinge: heat low enough"Cook slowly" is the whole instruction. On a modern burner that means medium-low. Raw potato needs the full fifteen to twenty minutes to soften, and anything hotter sets a dark crust long before the interior gives way.
- Drying the potatoChop the potatoes just before cooking and pat them dry in a towel. Surface water fights the oil and delays browning; if you have held them in water to stop them discoloring, drying is not optional.
- FinishingUncover for the last three or four minutes to let the trapped steam escape and firm the crust. Loosen the edge with a spatula and turn the cake out browned side up, or slide it onto a plate and invert it back into the pan to brown the second side.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt to a pound of potato is light by current taste. Season again after turning out.
The book belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the branded cookbook, issued by a manufacturer and built entirely around one product. Mazola, a corn oil introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company in the 1910s, was marketed as a clean, neutral, all-purpose alternative to lard and butter for frying, and a booklet of recipes that specified it by name in every list of ingredients was one standard way of teaching cooks a new fat. Hashed brown potatoes themselves are older than the oil; the name appears on American restaurant and hotel menus by the late nineteenth century, and is usually explained as a shortening of "hashed and browned," though that account is traditional rather than documented. Many published versions of the period start from cold boiled potatoes. Starting from raw, as here, is a variant that a hot fat and a lid make possible, and it shows the booklet doing its real job: demonstrating that the product handles a job the reader had previously done another way.