All joking aside, my favorite dish is hash.
I have never actually been in the kitchen to see hash pass through the
various stages of its epicurean development, but I imagine hash is
manufactured something like this:
First the father must eat a big lunch, the mother must fill herself up
on cake in the afternoon and the children must have spoiled stomachs.
This condition of affairs ruins the evening meal completely and there
is plenty of meat left over for hash the next day.
The cook takes the beef or veal or whatever it is and throws it into
the electric fan. The flying bits of meat are caught on ping pong
rackets by experts and knocked back into a pot that contains a large
quantity of mashed potatoes. Then the fire is lighted and the cook can
go out to an afternoon movie.
The beauty of hash is that, no matter how it tastes, you think it is
all right. There is no standard flavor for hash. Hash is fundamentally
accidental, so it has no traditions to live up to.