Skip to main content
Main

Hashed Beef or Mutton

A hash made from thinly sliced beef or mutton, simmered with gravy, bones, and seasonings.

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

Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hashed Beef or Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the meat into thin slices, trimming off gristle, skin, and brown outsides.

  2. Place the meat slices in a small clean dish.

  3. Pour the saved gravy over the meat slices.

Make the stock

  1. In a saucepan, combine the chopped bones, gristles, skins, and trimmings.

  2. Cover the mixture with water.

  3. Add the sliced onion.

  4. Season with pepper and salt.

  5. Boil gently for at least two hours.

  6. Strain the liquid into a bowl.

  7. Place the bowl in cold water.

  8. Once the liquid is cold, remove the layer of fat.

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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef or mutton
Forms the main body of the hash, providing the meat texture and flavour.
Gravy from the joint
Adds moisture and concentrated meat flavour to the sliced meat.
Bones
Release gelatin during slow simmering, giving the stock body and mouthfeel.
Onion
Contributes savoury aroma and mild sweetness to the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Boil gently for at least two hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavour and gelatin from the bones slowly. A hard, rolling boil churns fat into the liquid, making the stock cloudy and greasy and harder to skim cleanly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper. 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.

More beef hash recipes

Corned 114Cold 44with Spaghetti 5Salt 3 See all 112 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes