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Vegetable Hash
1 pint chopped cooked potato 1 pint mixed cooked vegetables 3/4 cup white sauce 1/4 cup Mazola Tomato or chopped egg sauce The mixed vegetables may be any kind, as cooked carrots, turnips, cabbage, beets, peas, chopped string beans, lima beans, stewed corn, onions, etc. If cooked onion is not among the vegetables, a little raw, minced onion should be added. Combine the ingredients. Heat the Mazola in a medium-sized frying pan, pack in the hash an inch deep and fry until browned.
A leftovers dish built on the old rule that anything already cooked can be bound with white sauce and browned in a pan. The points below sort out the measures, the fat and the one step that decides whether it comes out as a crisp cake or a pile of warm mush.
- The hinge: pack it and leave itThe recipe has you pack the hash an inch deep and fry it until browned, which means leaving it undisturbed over moderate heat long enough for a brown crust to form underneath. Stirring gives you reheated vegetables rather than hash.
- Pint as a dry measureA pint here is 2 cups by volume, not a weight. Two cups chopped potato and two cups mixed vegetables; the potato will run around 10-12 oz chopped, the mixed vegetables anywhere either side of that depending what they are.
- MazolaCorn oil, sold under that name since the early twentieth century and still available. Any neutral oil works; a quarter cup is generous for a frying pan, and two to three tablespoons is enough unless the pan is large.
- White sauceA medium white sauce, conventionally about 2 tablespoons fat and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together to 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt; in a Mazola book the fat may well be the oil rather than butter. Three-quarters of a cup is the binder, so it should be thick enough to coat a spoon rather than pour freely.
- Dry the vegetablesBoiled beets, cabbage and turnips carry a lot of water, and wet vegetables will steam instead of browning. Drain well and blot, and keep beets to a small proportion unless you want the whole hash stained pink.
- The raw onionMince it fine and let it go into the pan with the mixture rather than being scattered on top, or it will stay sharp and crunch against the soft interior.
- SeasoningThe original gives no seasoning directions. Taste the mixture before it goes into the pan; leftover vegetables are usually underseasoned.
- YieldRoughly four servings. The tomato or chopped egg sauce reads as an accompaniment served over or beside the hash rather than something stirred through it, though the recipe lists it with the ingredients.
This is a promotional cookbook from the Corn Products Refining Company, the makers of Mazola, and the recipe does what such books were built to do: take a dish every household already made and route it through the sponsor's product. Vegetable hash itself is far older than the brand — hash is simply chopped food, from the French hacher, to chop, and American cookbooks from the nineteenth century onward treat it as a common way of using up leftover vegetables and roast. What marks this version as early twentieth century is the white sauce binding and the appearance of a meatless hash at all. Corn oil was a comparatively new domestic fat at the time, sold as a modern substitute for butter and lard in frying, and recipe pamphlets like this one were one of the ways cooks were encouraged to try it.