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Warmed-Over Meats Hash

A hash of cooked meat and potatoes seasoned with salt, pepper, flour, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Warmed-Over Meats Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut away all bone and gristle from the meat.

  2. Chop cold potatoes or mash freshly boiled ones.

  3. Mix the meat and potatoes, season with salt and a little flour.

Cook

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan, add the mixture, and let it brown without stirring.

  2. Once browned, turn it out flat on a platter or fold like an omelet.

  3. Add freshly ground pepper after cooking.

Serve

  1. Serve on triangular pieces of toast if desired.

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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked meat
Provides the main savoury body and flavour of the hash.
Potatoes
Bind the meat together and add starch that helps form a crisp browned crust.
Flour
Lightly coats the mixture and helps it hold together and brown.
Lard
Conducts heat and adds fat that promotes browning in the pan.

The step that matters

Let it brown without stirring. Leaving the hash undisturbed lets a crust form on the pan surface through Maillard browning. Stirring keeps moisture and steam in contact with it, so the hash stays soft and pale instead of crisp.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, potato, flour, pepper):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, potato, flour, 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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