Oldest Hash Recipe: A college student in Portugal discovered a recipe dating back to the 15th century for a
Picadinho de Carne de Vaca or Beef Hash. Can you imagine Portuguese ships sailing to Brazil laden with Picadinho? Somehow, I know it’s related to Carnival, which is why Carne is in the name, obviously!
Regional Differences in the US: Southeast tends to like crab, Southwest tends to like rice, everywhere else seems to favor potatoes and just about any meat. Maine is unique in that it likes lobster and they pronounce it funny, like a cross between Bostonians pronouncing “Hah-vahd” and Simon Cowell saying “Dreadful”. See what I mean?
Hash Around the World: In Sweden, hash is called
Pytt I Panna and consists of potatoes, bacon or pork or ham, and onion and is served with eggs and pickled beets . In Latin America, it’s called
Picadillo and contains rice, beef, peppers and is served with eggs or tortillas. In North America and the British Isles – Hash is usually corned beef, potatoes and onion, with regional difference in the US noted above. It should be intuitively obvious the ubiquity of hash means it ascendency to prominence in your cooking repertoire is pre-ordained and is truly a result of globalization that started just after the last dinosaurs disappeared, but before gun powder was invented!
Amount of Corned Beef Hash Produced By Hormel per Year: 5 bazillion cans, which, if stretched end to end, would circle the earth enough times to consititute a
red hash bracelet visible from that former planet known as Pluto.
Google Results with “Hash” in the Results:57,300,000 (as of January, 2011). Interestingly enough, hash as used in security yields ~53,100,000 hits, hash food yields ~8,360,000 and hash drug yields ~3,160,000 and hash running yields ~15,700,000. And to tweeps using hashtag(s), ~1,870,000. I’m from Oregon, so here’s a shout out to the
Oregon Hash House Harriers! And to security geeks, eat more hash! Go on, try it yourself!
Hashing the Sport: Sort of a secret society like The Free Masons meets fraternity/sorority row for runners, hashers describe themselves as drinkers with a running problem. Groups throughout the US set up hashes where “rabbits” hide booze along a running path and “chasers” find them, drink them and engage in generally unruly and bawdy behavior.
Hashers like hash, beer and running. Oh, and they have itneresting nicknames derived from their bawdy behavior or quintessential character traits.
Hashing in Security: Security technology includes lots of important sounding words like encryption, authentication, identification, repudiation, nonces, etc. It turns out that
hashing in security parlance refers to a one-way scrambling function (hash) that renders whatever it transforms – data, passwords or keys – into meaningless garble that cannot be figured out by reverse engineering or other mathematical contrivances.This does not mean that the hash you make is meaningless garble nor it is secure, but it is truly delicious and easy to make, naturally!
Hash Tools: Sharp knives and an innate ability to tell the difference between a 1/4 inch dice and 1/2 inch cubes, duh! If in doubt, have a caliper, ruler or micrometer handy! A particularly stellar mandoline with the ability to dice is the crème de la crème – made by de Buyer.
Hash Tags: A recent convert to twitter, hash tags are defined by
twitter as, “The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.” Please use the #hashcapade hashtag whenever you tweet about hash!
Hash Key: If you’re like I am, the sound of a female operator with a British accent suggesting that you “please press the hash or square key” is fabulous. It makes me secretly yearn to put that voice on my iPod or wistfully search on facebook for Bridget Hashkey, at least I think that’s her name.
Happy Haspcapades,
Clark
