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Hash on Toast

A toasted bread topped with a brown sauce of butter, flour, stock, diced meat, and potatoes, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 adding the flour, stirring until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the stock or water, stirring until thickened.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the diced meat and potatoes to the sauce, and heat until warmed through.

  2. Serve the mixture over the toast and garnish with parsley and 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

Butter
Enriches the roux and adds richness and a nutty flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a smooth roux.
Stock or water
Forms the liquid base that the roux thickens into a smooth sauce.
Meat
Provides the main savoury substance of the hash, heated through in the sauce.
Potato
Adds body and bulk to the hash, soaking up sauce and softening as it warms.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce smooth as the stock goes in. Adding liquid too fast or without stirring lets flour clump, leaving lumps that a smooth thickened sauce cannot hide. Adding the liquid gradually while stirring lets starch granules disperse and swell evenly as the sauce thickens.

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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