LIFE IS SHORT; GO RIGHT FOR THE HASH


By the time I came along, my family had ceased farming. I “let myself out” summers to “earn my keep”, as the old folks might say, so I know a bit about the work involved in running a farm. However, I never experienced farm life in totality. But we generally kept a garden when I was young and the tradition of boiled dinners in the fall evoked the “spirit” of the farm life once so intimately known by my parents and grandparents.

At present we are blessed to have a delightful young woman working here as a guide who is a newlywed. She gave us all a chuckle the other day when she mentioned that friends had offered her and her new husband, a young man who grew up near Chicago, some of the vegetables from their garden. She grew up in Maine in a more rural setting, so gardens are “old hat” to her. But her husband had never been exposed to gardening during his upbringing and was surprised that the feathery green shafts rising out of the ground were attached to carrots. And after a brief moment of observation, he was forced to ask “How do you get them out?” To which she replied: “Just pull them.” And thus his gardening education began. So lest I assume that you are well acquainted with something that might be unknown to you, let me describe the boiled dinner:

A boiled dinner is utilitarian in every sense, the workhorse of meals, intended to fill the most number of stomachs for the longest time possible with the least effort and expense. It’s a hearty, filling meal more akin to “grub” than to “fare”. It’s composed of the plentiful root vegetables, the last crop of which, generally, constitutes the last fall harvest.

The traditional boiled dinner is not especially savory, though it might have been made so by the addition of herbs. No, the boiled dinner’s sole purpose was to “stick to the ribs” not to dazzle the tongue.

Potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips or rutabagas, and beets were thrown into a large pot and boiled together, along with a bit of salt pork. Now root vegetables have a strong flavor by themselves, but the long boiling time tends to diminish it a tad; the salt pork is tossed in so the cook does not feel herself to be a complete culinary failure when the whole red (from the bleeding of the beets) load is toted out to the waiting crew of farmhands laboring relentlessly to bring in the last harvests of the season.

Without intending to insult any boiled-dinner-philes, if there be any, I have to admit that I always found boiled dinners to be somewhat less than satisfying, the must-be-endured prelude of tastier things to come—red flannel hash.

Red flannel hash is made from the leftovers from the boiled dinner. The next night all of the vegetables were mashed together and fried with copious amounts of butter (and sometimes an extra helping of salt pork). I found the hash much more appealing than its boiled predecessor; the creamy sweetness imparted by the butter and the crunchy delicacies created by the frying (the famed Maillard reaction) were far more tantalizing to my young tongue than the previous evening’s meal.

As a kid I had culinary tunnel vision, never once supposing that the joy of the hash might be had without the introductory boiled dinner. But today, I never cook a boiled dinner. Oh, I boil the vegetables, but then I mash them and make the hash, completely eliminating the boiled prelude. They say that “Life is short; eat dessert first.” Our New England version might very well be “Life is short; go right for the hash.” It’s not a call to irresponsibility, not an “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die” philosophy. We all have responsibilities, and just think what a terrible world we’d live in if the “tomorrow we may die” philosophy prevailed.  But let’s prioritize. Let’s jettison the annoying things we can and be mindful about enjoying the sweet, transient pleasures of life whenever and wherever we can in a way that honors both ourselves and others.

And now if you’ll pardon me, I feel like eating hash…