There’s nothing like leftovers for breakfast…
Corned beef hash does what the best recipes do. It stretches food for longer, serves more people, and wastes nothing. You know how some people like leftovers better than the original meal? Well, corned beef hash is leftovers. From a New England Boiled Dinner, of all things. See, hacher is French for “to chop,” and that’s how you make hash. You chop your leftovers. And fry ‘em.
The New England Boiled Dinner has Irish immigrant roots. But not in the “corned beef came from Ireland” way that you might expect. Corned beef WAS made in Ireland, as a cheap export of questionable quality. And as cheap as it was, most Irish could never afford to eat it. But after the Great Famine (caused by the potato blight in 1845) Irish immigrants came to the US, and made enough money to be able to afford corned beef occasionally.
And where did they get this corned beef? Well, in NYC, it came from Kosher butchers, of course! Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were making high quality corned beef brisket, and Irish immigrants were buying it, boiling it with potatoes and cabbage, and making hash out of the leftovers.
The ideal hash ratio is 1 part potatoes to 1 part beef, but you have to assume that most hash consumed by the poor had a lot more tater and a lot less meat. But it was delicious. And it spread across the US. And today they sell it in a can. Don’t worry, it’s still leftovers, but of industrial food production instead of your home kitchen. Waste not, want not!