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Hash on Toast

A toasted bread topped with a brown sauce of diced meat, potatoes, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 hash

  1. Make a brown sauce by heating the fat in a pan and adding the flour, stirring until smooth.

  2. Add the diced meat and potatoes to the sauce along with the water or stock, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper. Cook until heated through.

Serve

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

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. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the fat into a smooth brown sauce that coats the meat and potatoes.
Potato
Adds body and soft starchy pieces that help bulk out the hash.
Cooked meat
Provides the main savory flavor and substance of the hash.
Fat
Carries flavor and helps brown the flour for the sauce.

The step that matters

Making the brown sauce. Stirring the flour into the hot fat until smooth cooks out raw flour taste and prevents lumps. Adding liquid to a poorly mixed roux leaves lumps that do not dissolve evenly.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, sauce, flour, pepper, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, sauce, 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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