The Hash Archive

Musée Mécanique, San Francisco

 

Both Sherdos grew up loving the dish generally known simply, and somewhat imprecisely, as "hash." 

S. grew up eating something he knew as "corn-beef hash," and which (even when you had it at a breakfast counter) always came out of a can.  When you opened the can, the hash came out as a can-shaped tube of pink stuff (with perhaps a somewhat uncomfortable resemblance to dog food).  But when you fried it up in a pan, squishing it back into little bits, and served it with a fried egg or two, it still seemed like something special.   F., by contrast, grew up often eating a hash made from left-over homemade corned or roast beef, coarsely ground with a hand meat grinder screwed to the side of the kitchen table and combined with diced onions and leftover boiled potatoes.  It was served with a poached egg on top.  When time was short and even the leftovers were scarce, F.'s family would sometimes have corned beef hash out of a can from a company called Mary’s Kitchen, fried in little patties.  Since F.'s mother's name was also Mary, the family joke was that both versions of hash were from Mary’s kitchen.  The dog food appearance of the canned version served to highlight the messy hodgepodge of flavors and textures, crispy bits and soft centers, of the homemade version.   

A similar dish from F's childhood was called “farmers’ breakfast,” although we didn’t know any farmers.  In our multi-ethnic Chicago neighborhood, where we knew people from all over the world, it was farmers who appealed as exotic.  Presumably, those farmers needed hearty breakfasts.  Farmers’ Breakfast, as served in Mary’s kitchen, was a hash of leftover potatoes and onions, perhaps meat scraps, fried crisp and brown over low heat for a long time, and then bound together with scrambled egg. 

As so often happens with words that refer to foods, the word "hash" begins referring to something very simple and ends up with some more complicated connotations.  It descends originally from the French word hacher, "to chop."  The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest senses of the word "hash" as "something cut up into small pieces," and then specifically, "a dish consisting of meat which has been previously cooked, cut small, and warmed up with gravy and sauce or other flavouring."  Although the English word is not quite as old as some of those we have discussed in this blog, it has been around for a long time: as the OED records, Samuel Pepys, in his famous diary from the 1660s, mentions having a "first course" of "a hash of rabbits and lamb."  Later,  presumably because hash is essentially a simple dish lending itself to improvisation and variation, and in which cheap things like onions and potatoes supplement more expensive meats, hash lent its name to the lowest form of commercial eating establishment: the "hash house" or "hash joint," in which waiters “sling hash.” 

The ubiquity of this term for a cheap place to eat is revealed in the miniature hash house shown above: from the mechanized model of a carnival at San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique.

In later colloquial uses, the word hash picks up vaguely negative or even violent connotations.  To “make a hash of” something, an expression usually used metaphorically for things outside of the kitchen, means to spoil or ruin it.  As we once again learn from the OED, the poet Alexander Pope speaks of "The Hash of Tongues, A Pedant makes."  Even more strikingly, to “settle someone’s hash" (an expression that seems to us sadly out of favor) means something like "to reduce to order; to silence, subdue; to make an end of."  Even when it remains in the kitchen, hash today still means (citing the OED one last time), "a mixture of mangled and incongruous fragments; a medley; a spoiled mixture; a mess, jumble.”  Oh dear!  Frankly, this seems to remain the case even with the hash that sometimes appears on the menus of fancy restaurants, along with meatloaf and other tasty, homely mishmashes, in homage to the home cooking many people remember but don’t do anymore.  These fancy and overpriced restaurant versions tend, on the one hand, to overdo it by loading on cheese, overcooking the eggs, and leaving the meat in big chunks; and, on the other hand, to underdo it, serving pallid potatoes and never letting anything get crisp enough. 

Thus, we want to make a pitch here for making hash at home.  However paradoxical it may seem for what is always an improvisational dish, we suggest you plan ahead, collecting choice leftovers in what we think of as the “hash archive.”  

There are four secrets to good hash, in our view:  1) begin with good ingredients (certainly nothing spoiled); 2) plan and cook in advance to build the “hash archive,” that is, the leftovers that will make the hash; 3) think beyond the spud; 4) and cook the ingredients one at a time to insure browning.  This last step, on which we’ll elaborate below, is not one Mary used.  If memory serves, she threw everything into a huge cast iron skillet and somehow got it all to brown.   

We have gotten into the habit of building the hash archive by saving extra roast vegetables and now, increasingly, roasting extra vegetables on purpose so that there will be leftovers for hash.  When we have hash in view, we tend to roast the vegetables whole (in the case of small potatoes or turnips) or in large slices (in the case of other root vegetables) so that they don’t dry out.    

Here, for instance, is a baking sheet of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, parsnips, and celery root ready to go into the oven.  Some would be smashed into a rough mash.  The rest went into the hash archive for later in the week.

 
When it comes time to make your hash, you’ll need onions, shallots, or leeks.  If you are taking up the opportunity to use things up, you might even have one or more of each. Three cheers for you.  You’ll need at least some roasted (or boiled) vegetables.  But your hash will be tastiest if you have a range of different things: for instance, potatoes, butternut squash, and celery root make a great combination.  We rarely make hash without celery root because it adds so much flavor.  (Guevara/Cortez/LVL produce at the south end of the market almost always has celery roots.)  The goal is to balance earthy, sweet, and salty flavors.  Although our hash usually has a little meat in it, it is easy to make a delicious hash that's completely vegetarian.  Eggs make a great finish.  For equipment, all you need are a large skillet and a big bowl.

Chop everything roughly the same size so that everything will mingle together well in the finished hash. First brown your meat, if you are using it. The meat lays the foundation for the layers of flavor in the hash and will then serve as a kind of garnish.  We love scraps of grilled skirt steak, recently mentioned in another post.  Leftovers from roasted pork loin or turkey work well.  A Holiday ham could easily make an appearance here.  A strip or two of bacon is always a good addition to hash. Once the meat is brown and crispy, we remove it and reserve it to add to the hash at the very end because we don’t want it to be steamed by the addition of the vegetables as they cook.  

Add oil to the pan, and saute your onions, leeks, and/or shallots. You want to take the time to let the vegetables get golden and soft.  This is crucial to the flavor of your hash.  If you feel impatient, try dancing around singing “you can’t hurry hash, no you just have to wait.”

When you are happy with your onions, take them out and put them in a large bowl (where you will assemble your hash before returning it to the pan).  Then add a little more oil and turn up the heat.  When your oil is hot, add your potatoes.  You really want to brown them.  Then in batches cook each of the vegetables you are including in your hash.  When you are satisfied with each vegetable, take it out and add it to the bowl. Conclude with the vegetable with the highest sugar content (say the butternut squash) and watch the heat so that you don’t blacken your pan.

When all of the vegetables are done, mix it all up and then return the hash to the skillet over low while you cook the eggs, poached or sunny side up.  It is also possible to put the hash in individual ramekins, crack an egg onto the top of each, and bake them in the oven (350 degrees) until the eggs set.  The timing on this is not that predictable so we tend to stay at the stove top.

A word about those eggs.  When we opened the carton from Chowdown Farms we gasped with pleasure at the varied colors of the eggs.  We also love the number on each carton of Islote Farms eggs, like limited edition lithographs.  These are fresh, local eggs and they are a treat, each and every time.  

We usually serve hash for dinner.  But if you are serving it for a holiday breakfast, you might consider another mishmash from a Chicago childhood.  The Chicago hash-eater’s father, who never cooked, did make juice drinks with a great deal of chaotic showmanship.  These began with frozen orange juice in a blender but they could easily start with fresh squeezed.  The blender, however, is crucial.  He liked to throw whole fruit into the running blender from across the room, usually with a nifty pitch and a whistle.  He usually threw in a banana (sans peel).  But he especially liked a whole apple, causing even the stalwart bar blender to groan and hiccup.  We’d advise you to take the seeds out of the apple, but leave the peel on.  Pears and persimmons might also go in with skins on but without cores or stems.  To avoid utter mayhem, your blender should not be too full when you start throwing fruit into it.  But, if you have children to amuse, you might consider tossing some fruit into the whirling blender, knowing that you will probably have to wipe up later.  The result is a frothy drink that Dad would have given a name, such as a “sunrise surprise frappe.”  But even better is the delicious sense of making hash out of the simple task of preparing juice.  As Dad would have said, wiping foam off his small helper’s glasses, “don’t tell your mother how we did this.”

Skirt Steak Salad

More often than not, we decide what to make based on what we see at the market and what ends up in our shopping bags.  That is especially true of salads, which we compose in response to what we buy rather than searching for ingredients from a recipe.  Recently we made a main dish salad organized around the beautiful Italian salad mix from Fiddler’s Green, to which we added julienned red cabbage (from Guevara), carrots (from Capay Fruits and Vegetables), and red onions (from Cadena Farm) to boost the already intense color, texture, and flavor; the miraculous winter tomatoes Towani Organic Farm is still bringing to the market; Nicasio Valley Foggy Morning cheese; and marinated and grilled skirt steak from Yolo Land and Cattle.  This is, then, a market salad start to finish, except for a few olives from the Co-op.  

Serving the steak on top of a salad updates how it was served in one of our childhood homes, where a little very flavorful steak went a long way when served over rice.   Skirt steak from Yolo Land and Cattle comes in reasonably small packages—about one pound.  One package can serve 4 people when served this way.  Even marinated, skirt steak is quite chewy, which is its charm.  But skirt steak is MUCH better if you marinate it for 12 to 24 hours.  You need the acidic marinade to tenderize the meat. 

We got the idea for the marinade and dressing for this salad from Roger Hayot’s Dinner at the Authentic Café, the cookbook from a restaurant we loved in Los Angeles, years ago.  This is a great cookbook undermined by a terrible design: the ingredient lists are presented in a pale lime green, making them almost illegible.  Yet this cookbook has survived our frequent purges of our collection because, despite the bad choices of some anonymous book-designer, this one is filled with absolutely terrific recipes of all kinds. (Hayot's title is an ironic one, since his cooking is eclectic in the extreme.)

The original marinade recipe is this.  We confess that we sometimes randomly throw something like these ingredients right into a container with the skirt steak rather than carefully making the marinade first.  But we try to hold you to a higher standard. 

Marinade:

In a blender, whir together:

2 tablespoons heavy soy sauce

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

2 tablespoons champagne vinegar

1 clove of garlic (peeled and roughly chopped)

1 small chile, (seeded and roughly chopped) or a generous slug of Siracha sauce

1 tablespoon cilantro leaves

1 teaspoon agave or honey

Ground pepper

1/3 cup mild oil

Submerge the steak in the marinade and refrigerate at least overnight.  This is something you can prep on the weekend to eat later in the week.   You can bring home your steak from the market, marinate it after it thaws, and then leave it in the marinade for a few days until you’re ready to cook it.  Whenever you’re poking around in the refrigerator, turn the steak so that all sides are permeated with the marinade.

When it comes time to cook the meat, we cook it in a cast iron skillet over high heat.  It is also possible to cook it on the grill or under the broiler.  Whatever you do, crank up the highest heat you can.  Skirt steak always cooks very fast—let’s say 3-4 minutes a side.  But grassfed beef like that from the market is lower fat and it cooks even faster.  So you might want to turn it after just 2 minutes and check it after 2 minutes on the second side.

Let the steak rest for a while (10 minutes?) before cutting it against the grain in thin slices.

Place the still warm slices over the salad, and then sprinkle a little of the Nicasio Valley cheese over the top.

Here’s the dressing.  Again, in a blender whir together:

½ cup balsamic vinegar

2 medium shallots, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

freshly ground pepper

¼ teaspoon salt

After this is processed smooth, add, in a steady stream:

¾ cup olive oil.

The result is a thick, nicely emulsified dressing.
 

While we are talking about salads, we want to show another that emerged from a random shop rather than a recipe.  Here we combined Asian pear and persimmon (from Rifat Ahmad), pomegranate (we think this one is from Ramon Cadena), the red walnuts Siegfried dates has been selling, Good Humus salad mix, and a little of that same Foggy Morning cheese.  We dressed this with some Glashoff toasted walnut oil and a little Meyer lemon juice, salt, and pepper.  Again, this salad requires a stroll through the market rather than a recipe.  But its combination of colors, textures, and flavors really could not be bettered by elaborate preparation, slavish conformity to a recipe, or ambitious foraging.  It’s all right here.  And it’s wonderful.

Why a Duck? (part two): Seared Duck Breast with Duck Risotto

In this post we continue our cooking project from the last one.  Next up on our duck agenda would be seared duck breast served with duck risotto and a pan sauce made with our duck demi glace and some beautiful homemade preserved cherries in beaujolais wine that we had reserved from last summer’s harvest. 

(We learned to make these cherries from Eugenia Bone’s book Well Preserved. You can find the recipe at various places on the internet, including http://www.denverpost.com/food/ci_12595911.  But note that Bone has since revised this recipe to include 6 cups rather than two quarts of red wine.  One of the great things about Bone’s book is that she guides you toward making preserves with savory uses and helps you think about how to use them). 

To be frank, we thought this was one of the very best things we have ever cooked — which means, we dare add, one of the best things we’ve ever eaten. 

Our approach here was conditioned by a variety of recipes from different books.   The basic technique for making risotto is widely available, so here we’ll primarily emphasize simply that this dish really depends on a few key ingredients:  the shallots you first soften in olive oil, the rice, the parmigiano reggiano and a pat of butter added at the end — but above all, the stock in which you cook the rice.   

True Italian-style risotto absolutely requires the variety of rice called “Arborio,” which was named after the town in the Piedmont region where it was originally grown.  At one time this variety of rice was grown only in Italy, but today it is also grown in California and elsewhere in the United States.  Arborio rice is distinguished by its high starch content, which produces the creamy texture of the finished dish, and especially by its ability to absorb large amounts of liquid without becoming mushy as regular rice would do.  Thus, in this dish, the rice is really there as an edible, chewy container for the stock; and the taste of the risotto depends above all on the concentrated flavor of all the bounty that went into your stockpot.  The texture of the finished dish, however, depends on the cooking, which has to be done with constant attention at the last minute, just before serving.

(The whole-grain advocate in the household would like to point out that you can make a pretty decent farroto, a kind of higher-fiber risotto, using semi-pearled farro.)  

Other recipes taught us that the duck breasts, boneless but with the skin still attached, should be pounded flat and the skin scored in a checkerboard pattern with a sharp knife.  The pounding allows them to cook quickly and evenly; the scoring of the skin encourages the fat to melt slowly and the skin to crisp over a medium-high fire.  

While we have eaten less meat since moving to California, we’ve had to learn to wrestle more intimately with that meat.  If you buy a duck at the market, you will need to break it down yourself.  Learning to do so has enabled us to buy whole birds but to make a duck leg ragu one night and seared duck breasts another.

Basically, for this dish you sear your duck breasts quickly on both sides over medium-high to high heat, and take them out and keep them warm.  Then you should pour off most of the fat from the pan (duck is notoriously high in fat), and then make a quick pan sauce in the same pan. As is well known, duck takes well to a slightly sweet sauce because of its dark and relatively fatty meat.  The sauce here is essentially a variation on the famous French red-wine sauce sometimes called “marchand de vin”: a combination of pan drippings, red wine, and stock or demi-glace (the latter being nothing other than an already-reduced form of stock).   In this case we used our cherries, which had been preserved in reduced red wine, instead of just regular wine out of the bottle, which also provided a light but not cloying note of sweetness. Basically, after removing the cooked duck breasts, you "de-glaze" the pan with wine (or, in our case, with our preserved cherries in wine), stirring to dislodge any brown bits; and then add your demi-glace (which will quickly melt into the hot liquid), and reduce under low to medium heat until it has the consistency of a sauce. You can also use regular liquid stock here, which will just mean that you need longer to reduce it.

This dish thus depended on two labor-intensive ingredients that we had in the pantry.  The cherries in wine allowed us to remember and savor the ghost of the taste of early summer.  

The demi-glace is the flavor of duck reduced to a dark paste that will keep for a long time in the refrigerator, much longer than would regular fresh liquid stock.  Indeed, our modern word “restaurant” originally referred to something like demi-glace: that is, to a concentrated meat or poultry broth.  Thus the first French restaurants in the eighteenth century resembled Boulette’s Larder in the San Francisco Ferry Building, selling ready-made bouillons and “restaurants” for immediate consumption or to take home. As Susan Pinkard writes in her A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, “Given how time-consuming it was to make these kitchen staples from scratch, buying them already prepared in just the amount needed would have made a lot of sense for smaller households” (206).  Even as it is interesting to be reminded how the commercialization of cooking and eating emerged from the marketing of prepared “restaurants” it is also a pleasure to reverse that process, starting with market raw materials and cooking from scratch.

The leftovers were equally good.  One of us learned in childhood that many leftovers can be turned into savory cakes with molten centers and golden crispy edges.  The risotto was no exception.  We rolled the cold risotto into cakes with oiled hands, dusted them with parmesan, and then let them set in the refrigerator for a few hours before frying them in a mixture of butter and oil over medium heat.  It’s important not to worry them if you want a nice crust (and you do).  Served with Bledsoe’s Calibrese sausages (when their chalk board said “limited supply” we immediately bought them) and the leftover pan sauce, the cakes were less elegant than in their previous incarnation but just as good, if not better.