Hash

We had meat pretty regularly in Liberia, though the ship didn't always replenish the Lebanese Abi Jaoudi grocery store on time and the shelves could get a little bare. I liked the canned hams we had a couple times a year, though I never quite managed the key manipulation that would keep the strip from thinning to a snap or widening to engulf the key. Either way somebody had to fetch the pliers.

Abi Jaoudi carried mostly American/European foods, with some local fruits. It had a slightly musty smell, but we didn't mind—past the ground level tank with the large goldfish, past the automatic doors (amazing there!), inside, the small store (large by Liberian standards) was air conditioned! In the tropics! Mom had her list, and our requests for additions went unheeded. Although, if a birthday was coming up, and if the store had been supplied with options, we got to choose what flavor of cake.

You could find lunch meat, chicken, ground beef and other things that could be frozen or kept very cold for shipment. Denmark was closer than the US. Mom made great meatloaf.

Every now and then we had canned corned beef hash—not nearly often enough. I loved the stuff, greasy though it could be—perhaps the grease was part of the joy of it.

When I went to college I ate what the dorm served, or what grandmother made when I stayed with her on break, or what my parents had when I spent the last undergraduate year with them. Grandmother Lorene made cooking look easy. She'd go in the kitchen for a few minutes, then come back and watch TV for half an hour, then go in again, and again, and then supper would appear, sometimes chicken and potatoes and beans and fresh bread.

In grad school I was on my own, with no roommate to help with cooking or rent. I found how expensive some of my favorite foods could be—expensive enough to put a serious crimp in my book habit. Hash was too dear. As was Underwood Deviled Ham, which Grandpa Nugent had taught me about. He called it bacon, and ate it for breakfast on crackers.

But food expense was a solvable problem, so I got a cookbook and a crock pot and some garage sale pots and pan, and started trying some cheap dishes—especially ones that didn't require many or complicated ingredients.

I set black-eyed peas with some bacon in the crook pot to cook one morning, mouth watering in anticipation of the evening. However, a group of us wound up having to go to Fermilab for something that afternoon, and I didn't get back into the kitchen until after 10. Most of the water had boiled away, and the recipe was scorched. It took months to get the burnt taste out of the crock.

I tried one of the Betty Crocker pancake recipes—except the idea of getting buttermilk just for one recipe didn't sit well with me, so I substituted ordinary milk from the second recipe, confusing the two recipes in the process. The hybrid tasted quite good, and has become a family staple since then.

I learned the hard way that orange juice may be acid, but not so acid that a little mold can't build up in the pitcher's lid. I located the culprit when I recovered.

I learned that an off-brand of OJ concentrate reliably gave me indigestion, and read in the news a couple of years later that the manufacturer was indicted for adulteration—their OJ was mostly citric acid and sugar.

One day I decided to make my own corned beef hash, since the canned stuff was unaffordable. I figured that corned beef was beef, and ground beef was beef—and conveniently already chopped up for me too.

So I froze a pound of ground beef (cheapest grade). I would cut off a chunk and dice it up, then dice up a potato and small onion, and fry them all together. The ground beef even provided the fat to cook it all in.

I'd start this frying, dump a can of green beans into a pot to simmer, and sit down to watch the news, getting up to stir during the commercials. Grandma had made it seem easy. Then I'd drain off the fat and plop it all on a plate, with OJ on the side.

It never did taste nearly as good as corned beef hash, but it was my own, and inexpensive. Presumably it was nutritious too, though I only weighed 135 lbs when I married. (When I called Grandpa to tell him of the engagement, he demanded to speak with her. "Can you cook?" "Well, I just helped prepare a feast for 200." "Hmf. Well, you put 30 pounds on that knucklehead by Christmas or I'm sending you home to your mother!") I called my culinary experiment a success. The matrimonial decision worked far better.

In the meantime, while still unmarried, I kept reading about how good for you fish were supposed to be.

The prospect of having raw fish in the fridge, and being on a deadline to cook it, was daunting. I'd not grown up eating any fish other than fish sticks (and sometimes tuna salad), and only those when Dad was out of town—the New Orleans man hated fish. And the Liberian markets selling fish smelled pretty strong. Mom never shopped at them (she was a nurse, and taught hygiene and sanitation). So I had no favorite recipes to look back to. I'd had fish with potatoes once, so I knew they went together sometimes.

But canned anchovies would keep until I had the energy and enthusiasm at the end of the day to work with them. The usual fish recipes in the cookbook looked complicated, and none of them involved anchovies, but I figured that fish is fish. Well, I'm an experimentalist, right? And, OK, maybe a bit lazy.

Thus, one evening I diced up the potatoes and onions per usual and tossed them into a little oil, on the way to making my new patented anchovy hash.

The fish can had that little key opening tool, but I was much better at getting the strip unwound now. Dexterity had been a little slow in coming, but it got to me eventually.

The smell was quite a bit stronger than I expected. But I figured, soldier on, and try breaking the slippery things up into hash-sized chunks.

I'd not realized there'd be all these little bones. I quickly gave up on the ribs, but tried to pry out the spines.

Into the pan went the resulting shreds, beside the already-cooking potatoes and onions. Frying filled my apartment with anchovy smell, and then with too-hot anchovy smell. The fan over the stove exhausted into the apartment, so I opened the madras-cloth "curtains" and the windows, and set up the floor fan for a cross-breeze.

A little noise told me the neighbor's cats had decided to hang out under my back window.

After some contemplation I figured tea would be a better compliment than juice for this confection.

I cleared the books off the little table and sat down and looked at the hash.

I tried a bite.

I sipped a lot of tea, and ate about half the green beans.

I tried another bite. I had perpetrated this; I owed it to myself to make a go of it. And I hated throwing food away.

Plainly I was going to have to make more tea.

I ate the rest of the green beans, and looked at the hash again.

I scraped the plate into the trash and shoved a couple of paper towels on top to try to keep the odor down. An hour later I gave up and carted the trash out to the dumpster.

At least the cats liked the smell.

Some experiments fail.