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Vegetable Hash

A savory dish of finely cut vegetables cooked with butter and optional aromatics, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 370 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the vegetables fairly fine, ensuring they hold their shape.

  2. Mix the cut vegetables together and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Add minced onion, chives, parsley, chervil, or green pepper if desired.

  4. Moisten the mixture with up to ½ cup of meat broth, milk, or water.

Cook

  1. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter or savory drippings in a frying pan.

  2. Spread the hash evenly in the pan and dot with additional butter or drippings.

  3. Cover the pan and cook on medium heat for 30 minutes.

  4. Fold and turn the hash onto a hot platter, ensuring a rich brown crust forms.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately on hot plates.

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. Chive + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  4. Potato + chivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together611 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Chive + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked vegetables
Form the bulk of the hash and give it its body and texture.
Butter or savory drippings
Fat that fries the hash and helps create a browned crust.
Meat broth, milk, or water
Moisture that softens the mixture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cover and cook over medium heat. Cooking covered at medium heat for the full 30 minutes lets the hash heat through and soften, while the fat then browns the surface. Heat that is too high can scorch the bottom before the interior is hot, and too little time leaves the mixture pale and loose.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, pepper, chive, parsley, chervil, meat, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, pepper, chive, parsley, chervil, meat, butter. 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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