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Hash

Hash is a dish of meat, onions, and gravy served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,057 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Make the gravy separately by boiling bones, trimmings, vegetables, herbs, pepper, and salt for at least 1 hour.

  2. Fry a chopped onion in butter or dripping until brown.

  3. Mix flour with stock and pour into the saucepan, bringing it to a boil.

  4. Add any desired flavorings like catsup, anchovy, lemon, or nutmeg.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the gravy, warm the meat, and serve with fried or toasted bread slices.

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. Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

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

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

Meat
Is the main component, warmed through in the finished gravy and served with bread.
Butter or dripping
Provides fat for frying the onion, adding richness and browning flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stock as its starch swells when heated, giving the gravy body.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, carrying the flavour of the dish.
Onion
Browns in the fat, adding sweetness and savoury aroma to the gravy.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with the stock. Stir the flour into the stock thoroughly before adding it to the pan, so it disperses without lumps. Starch thickens the liquid only as it heats, so the gravy should be brought to a boil and kept there to fully thicken.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, flour, onion, sauce, anchovy, nutmeg):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, flour, onion, sauce, anchovy, nutmeg. 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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