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Hash on Toast

A toasted slice topped with a brown sauce of butter, flour, stock, Worcestershire, and diced potatoes and meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Hash on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Make a brown sauce by melting the butter in a pan and stirring in the flour.

  2. Add the stock or water, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper, and cook until thickened.

Assemble and serve

  1. Heat the diced meat and potatoes in the sauce until warmed through.

  2. Serve the mixture over the slice of toast.

  3. Garnish with parsley and additional toast points.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked potato
Forms the bulk of the hash and absorbs the sauce, giving body to the dish.
Meat
Adds savory flavor and substance to the hash.
Flour
Thickens the butter into a roux that gives the brown sauce its body.
Butter
Provides fat for cooking the flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Stock or water
Forms the liquid base that the roux thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Stirring the flour into melted butter and cooking it briefly creates a roux. Adding liquid to an uncooked mixture can leave lumps, while a well-stirred roux thickens the sauce smoothly.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, sauce, butter, flour, pepper, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, sauce, butter, flour, pepper, parsley. 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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