The regional table / Minnesota
Tater Tot Hotdish
This is not a recipe so much as a grammar, and once you have the grammar you can build a hundred of these without opening anything again.
Hotdish is a category with a fixed sentence structure: a protein, a starch, a vegetable, a binder out of a can, and something crisp laid over the top, baked in one dish and carried to a table that is not yours. The form is older than the word and older than the tot, and it can be watched assembling itself in the press. The Covington News of 16 November 1939 printed a column that reads like a template rather than a dish — one cup of diced cooked turkey or chicken, one cup of cooked peas, a large can of cooked spaghetti in tomato sauce, "Place in one large or individual casseroles. Sprinkle with — Rice flakes, finely crushed. Bake in a moderate oven (375° F.) 20 minutes, or until heated through." — and added that cooked macaroni in cream sauce with cheese may be substituted for the spaghetti. In the next column on the same page the binder appears by name: "1 small (10 oz.) can cream mushroom soup", stirred with flour and corn liquid into a thick gravy over chipped beef. The Jackson Herald of 27 June 1940 gives the same trick in one sentence: "Half a can of mushroom soup added to the gravy in the pan of baked meat loaf will give a grand flavor to that good old stand-by and make it seem like a new acquaintance." Interchangeable parts, a can of concentrate for sauce, a crushed-cereal lid, a moderate oven. That is hotdish, three years before anyone who could be found in print had written the word down for the food. Searched across the whole Georgia newspaper archive, the compound word "hotdish" turns up once before the war, in The True Citizen of 29 July 1938, and it is not a supper at all — it is pine needles and willow twigs woven into "hotdish mats".
The tot on top is not folk cooking and there is no point pretending otherwise: it is a factory product with a company behind it. That company is Ore-Ida, and its own patents put it on the federal record at Ontario, Oregon — United States Patent 3,865,964, granted 11 February 1975 to inventors "all of Ontario, Oreg." and assigned to "Ore-Ida Foods, Inc., Ontario, Oreg.", and United States Patent 4,186,836 of 5 February 1980, an optical machine for pulling the dark-spotted pieces out of a moving bed of cut potatoes, assigned to the same company at Boise. The tots reach a shopper in a dated document on 6 June 1958, in a grocery advertisement in the Atlanta Daily World: "Ore-Ida Tater Tots", thirty-three cents, between the candied yams and the sharp cheese. The 1975 patent is also the most honest description of the problem this recipe solves, because it is the manufacturer writing about its own frozen potatoes: put in an oven from frozen, it says, the product "is by no means the equivalent of the original", because moisture migrates out of the centre "without the compensating crisping effect of deep fat frying", which "tends to make the reconstituted product limp and soggy" and leaves it "generally a disappointment to the purchaser". Everything below is arranged to keep that from happening. No patent covering the invention of the tot itself could be found from here, so none is claimed; the quantities in a hotdish were never printed by anyone official and these were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
The tots ride on top and are never stirred in. Ore-Ida's own 1975 patent explains why in its background section: a frozen fried potato reheated in an oven goes limp because water moves out from the middle and there is no hot fat to dry the surface as it arrives. A tot buried in sauce is in a steam bath and has lost before the oven is warm. Laid in one layer above the filling, with its top face in dry oven air, it behaves like a fry in a fryer — the underside softens into the sauce, which is the point, and the top browns.
The soup is a sauce, not a soup, and the government says so. Condensed cream of mushroom soup has no standard of identity anywhere in Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations — FDA never wrote one, which is why no two brands are alike. What the regulations do fix is the concentration: § 101.9(b)(7)(v) uses condensed soup as its worked example of a product declared as "1/2 cup (120 mL) concentrated soup (makes 1 cup prepared)", and § 101.12 sets a reference serving of 245 grams for soups as eaten. Tipped into a casserole undiluted, a can is a starch-thickened emulsion at double strength. Treat it as the roux you did not make and add liquid deliberately, or it sets like wallpaper paste.
The mushrooms in the can are legally defined even though the soup is not. 21 CFR 155.201 does have a standard, and it is worth knowing what you are pouring: canned mushrooms are the food prepared from caps and stems of Agaricus bisporus or A. bitorquis, in one of six styles, of which the relevant one is "Pieces and stems — consisting of pieces of caps and stems of irregular shapes and sizes." That is the grey confetti in the can. Adding half a pound of fresh mushrooms browned hard in a dry pan puts back the flavour that the piece-and-stem style never had.
The beef is browned hard and drained, and the fat is not a seasoning here. Under 9 CFR 319.15, ground beef and hamburger may run up to 30 percent fat by law, and two pounds of it will give back most of a cup of grease. Left in, it rises through the sauce and pools under the tots, which then fry in it, break up and go greasy rather than crisp. Brown in a wide pan so the meat colours instead of stewing, then pour the fat off and keep it for eggs.
