Tell me about this ungoogleable onion/meat/pepper hash my grandpa liked

October 12, 2022 7:15 AM

My grandpa, a Dutch Jew raised in Antwerp, liked leftover roast meat cooked as a sort of hash with no potatoes — just meat and onions and black pepper. The name of this dish got passed down through the English-speakers in the family as "eye-a-fleysh" /aɪǝflaɪʃ/, and I think in real Dutch it maybe would be something like uivlees "onion meat"…

…The Internet seems to know nothing about this dish, at least not in English, and its ungoogleability has made me a little obsessed. Is this something he (or my grandma) made up? Or is there some culinary history here? Were other Dutch/Flemish/Jewish/maybe-Ukranian-if-it-was-my-grandma families eating this?

posted by nebulawindphone to Food & Drink (11 answers total)

This sounds like a Dutch hachee which is basically meat and onions.
The cut of meat used is also known as hachevlees.
posted by vacapinta at 7:24 AM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Some versions of Essig-Fleisch either are or are remade into a hash type dish.
posted by cobaltnine at 8:11 AM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hachee seems likely.
The beef has to be suitable for stewing. I guess like brisket. So maybe ask your butcher for brisket beef.
Cloves and bay leaf are essential spices.
Traditionally eaten with red cabbage and mashed potato.

Hachee is as Dutch as it gets. :-)
posted by jouke at 10:00 AM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Was there ever any egg in it? Said phonetically it kinda sounds like German or Yiddish "egg-meat."
posted by saladin at 10:23 AM on October 12, 2022

Regarding the name, it sounds to me more like ajuin (another word for onion in Dutch, IPA \aːˈjœy̯n\), and though the second part could be from the Dutch vlees for meat, I suspect it’s the yiddish word fleysh.
posted by meijusa at 10:26 AM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Hmm. This wasn't a stew, and no cloves or bay leaf. Just leftover roast meat, chopped up and fried with some onions and black pepper in a pan.

No egg either (and hilariously, searching for "Eiefleisch" eventually gets you ball-busting porn, which I guess I can see getting to from "egg meat"...)

"Ajuin" does seem like a better match than "ui," and connecting it to Yiddish "fleysh" makes sense. My grandpa didn't speak Yiddish, but his wife's family did, and while it was his favorite food, she was the one doing the cooking.
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:36 PM on October 12, 2022

Ajuin would be the more commonly used word for onion in Flemish Belgium and the south of the Netherlands.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:41 PM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I went through most of my grandmother's cookbooks*, and the closest thing to your description I can find is essigfleisch, from "The gourmets' guide to Jewish Cooking", London 1973.

2 lb of brisket
2 tablespoons of chicken fat
2 onions
2 carrots
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
grated rind of 1/2 lemon
juice of 1 lemon
1/2 pint of stock
(extra sugar and lemon juice to taste)

Cut the meat into pieces. Melt the fat in a pan and brown the meat and remove to plate. Prepare and chop the onions and carrots, add to pan and fry until brown. Add the sugar and cook until it darkens a little. Add the lemon rind and juice and stock, and put the meat back in. Bring to the boil, cover the pan tightly and simmer for two hours. Adjust the seasoning. Serve with bread.

I suppose that if this was made with pieces of leftover brisket (for instance), it could be made in 30 mins or something, the time it takes to soften and color the onions. And then you would just warm the meat in the onion-stock-acid mix. My gran would often use vinegar in place of lemon juice or vice versa. In this case the name points to vinegar - "essig" - rather than lemon, I don't know why the cookbook authors have changed it. Another thing my gran would always do was grate the carrots, so they were near invisible in the final dish.

Anyway, this looks delightful and I will try it next time we decide to have a meat day.

*I keep the pre WWII books from my great-grandmother at our farm, and they would probably be more relevant in this case.
posted by mumimor at 2:08 PM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Looking at it again, I feel the recipe I posted is perhaps too stew-like. Then I tried to recipe search using only ingredients (not the name) in French and Flemish, but my proficiency in those languages is clearly inadequate. I keep getting boeuf flamande/stoofvlees. Maybe others can do this better. Is there a Yiddish internet? Because that might be an interesting search too, to get all of the Eastern recipes.

BTW, strips of meat and a lot of onions with black pepper is similar to fegato alla veneziana, which is one of my favorite dishes. It makes a lot of sense. The Italian recipe uses wine, but in Northern Europe, vinegar would be much more available and cheaper.
posted by mumimor at 2:38 PM on October 12, 2022

I'm wondering if there could be any connection with something I grew up with in Norway, and which is common throughout Scandinavia: "Pytt-i-panne."

This is commonly done with potatoes but it's basically just a very loose recipe idea for using leftovers, with a leftover meat as the main ingredient.
posted by edlundart at 2:53 PM on October 12, 2022

Essigfleisch is also an interesting option. In the south of the Netherlands there's 'zuurvlees'. Where the meat is tenderised by marinating in vinegar. ('Essig' is german for vinegar). Plenty of recipes for Limburgs zuurvlees online.
posted by jouke at 5:55 AM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]