Skip to main content
Main

White Hash

A dish of finely minced chicken or turkey simmered in a creamy broth and served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

White Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Remove the skin from the cold chicken or turkey and mince the meat very fine.

  2. Season the minced meat with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper.

Make the stock

  1. In a saucepan, combine the skin, bones, sliced onion, bay leaf, and a little salt.

  2. Let it stew for 30 minutes, then strain the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the hashed meat to the strained liquid and let it stew for a few minutes.

  2. Before serving, stir in ½ cup of cream mixed with a little corn starch to thicken.

  3. Serve the hash on thin slices of toast.

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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Pepper + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Onion + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,205 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken or turkey
Provides the main body of the hash, so it should be minced fine to cook evenly.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished hash.
Corn starch
Thickens the cream-enriched liquid so it coats the meat rather than running thin.

The step that matters

Stirring in the cream and corn starch. Corn starch thickens only when heated, and the cream mixture should be added just before serving so it thickens without boiling hard, which can cause the cream to separate.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, cream, corn):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, cream, corn. 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes