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Hash and Toast

A dish of toasted bread topped with a mixture of cold beef or mutton, butter, salt, pepper, and water or stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hash and Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the slices of bread and place them on a platter.

  2. Finely chop the cold beef or mutton.

Make the hash

  1. In a saucepan, combine the meat with salt, pepper, and butter.

  2. Add enough water or stock to absorb into the toast.

  3. Boil for ten minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the toast and serve immediately.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

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

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold beef or mutton
Provides the main savoury body of the hash once finely chopped and cooked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour through the meat mixture.
Slices of bread
Form the base that soaks up the hot meat mixture.
Water or stock
Supplies moisture that softens the meat and is absorbed by the toast.

The step that matters

Boiling the meat mixture. Boiling for the full ten minutes cooks the meat in the liquid and reduces it, so the mixture is thick enough to sit on the toast rather than soak it into sogginess.

“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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