The first is by cooking them. Meat, when once cooked, should only be heated. If it is again stewed or fried, it tends to make it hard and tough, and diminishes its flavor.
The second is by frying the butter or gravy in which they are prepared. It has been shown that this is very injurious to the healthfulness of food. Butter and oils may be melted without changing their nature, but when cooked, they become much more indigestible and injurious to weak stomachs.
The third mode of injuring hashes is by putting in flour in such ways that it is not properly cooked. Flour dredged on to hashes while they are cooking generally imparts the raw taste of dough.
The fourth mode is by putting in so much water as to make them vapid, or else so much grease as to make them gross.
The fifth is by seasoning them with so little care, that they either have very little savory taste, or else are so hot with pepper and spice as to be unhealthy.
If a housekeeper will follow these directions, or give them to a cook who will follow them exactly, she will always have good and healthful hashes.
To prepare Gravy for a Cold Beef Hash, or Steak Hash.
For a small dish for six persons, put a tea-cup and a half of boiling water into a small sauce-pan, and make a thin paste with a heaping teaspoonful of flour, wet with a great spoonful of cold water. Stir it in, and boil it three minutes. Then put in half a teaspoonful of black pepper and rather more salt, and let it stand where it will be kept hot, but not boiling, till fifteen minutes before it is to be used.
Then cut the beef into half-inch mouthfuls and take as many mouthfuls of cold boiled potato, and half as many of cold turnip. Put these all together into a tin pan the size of a dining plate. Then stir in two great spoonfuls of butter into the gravy till melted, and, if you like tomato catsup, add a great spoonful, and pour it over the hash, and cover it with a plate and let it heat on the stove, or trivet, ten minutes, and then serve it.
If the hash is made without vegetables, take only a tea-cup full of water, and a teaspoonful of flour, and a little less pepper and salt.