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Hash D LA Provencale

A Provencal hash of beef, mutton, pork, bacon, parsley, onion, thyme, and vegetables, slow‑cooked for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Hash D LA Provencale

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Hash the beef, mutton, pork, bacon, parsley, onion, and thyme together.

  2. Mould the mixture into a bowl shape, placing it in a stew-pan.

  3. Make a hole in the center of the mixture to create a crown shape.

Cook

  1. Cook slowly for 2 hours.

  2. Halfway through cooking, add peeled and sliced potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, vegetable marrow, or cucumbers around the crown.

  3. Remove excess fat before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main meaty body and structure of the hash.
Mutton
Adds rich, savoury meat flavour and some fat that carries flavour through slow cooking.
Fresh pork
Contributes fat and tenderness, keeping the meat moist during long slow cooking.
Bacon
Adds smoky, salty fat that flavours the whole mixture as it renders.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth as it softens during slow cooking.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 2 hours. Low, slow heat lets the tough connective tissue in the meats break down into gelatin, so the hash turns tender and moist rather than dry and stringy. Rushing with high heat toughens the meat and can scorch the base of the stew-pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, mutton, pork, parsley, thyme, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, mutton, pork, parsley, thyme, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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