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Hash with Toast

A dish of toasted bread soaked in salted water, topped with boiled cold chopped meat and optional gravy or potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and potato work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 786 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Hash with Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Toast the stale bread slices until golden.

  2. Soak the toasted bread in water with a pinch of salt for about 30 seconds.

  3. Arrange the soaked bread on a long meat platter.

Cook the hash

  1. In a pot, heat the cold chopped meat and cover it with water.

  2. Allow the meat to boil until most of the water has evaporated.

  3. If available, remove the fat from the leftover gravy and add it to the meat.

  4. Boil the mixture for a few minutes.

  5. For added flavor, chop and add a few cold potatoes before removing from heat.

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

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

  2. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Bread + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the base that soaks up the liquid and holds the hash together.
Cold chopped meat
Provides the main protein and savory flavor of the hash.
Leftover gravy
Adds moisture and savory richness to the meat as it cooks.
Cold potatoes
Adds starch and body, thickening the mixture slightly as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil until most of the water has evaporated. Reducing the water concentrates the meat's flavor and keeps the hash from turning soggy. Stopping too early leaves a watery mixture that does not hold together well.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, meat. 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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