Cut the potatoes into small dice pieces and fry in hot lard. Then fry 1 onion cut fine in hot butter, but do not brown; stir in some flour; then add milk, salt, pepper and parsley. Let boil up once and add the potatoes to the sauce. Let all get very hot and serve.
A potato-and-onion stew built on a white sauce, written in the telegraphic style of a daily calendar cookbook — no quantities, no yield, no timings. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so treat the list below as the missing half of the recipe.
- Working quantitiesFor four people, about 2 lb potatoes, 1 medium onion, 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, and 2 to 2½ cups milk. The sauce should coat the potatoes rather than swim around them.
- Lard for fryingThe original calls for lard, i.e. rendered pork fat. Any neutral high-heat fat works; lard or bacon drippings give the flavour the recipe was written around.
- Dice and fry, not boilThe hinge of the dish is that the potatoes are fried through in fat before they meet the sauce. Cut them no larger than ½ inch, fry in a single layer over medium-high heat until browned and tender at the centre, and drain. Crowding the pan steams them and the stew turns to mush.
- "Do not brown" the onionThis is a white sauce, and browned onion would tint and sweeten it. Sweat the onion in butter over low heat until translucent only, then stir in the flour.
- Cook out the flourLet the flour and butter bubble a minute before the milk goes in, and add the milk gradually off the heat or in a thin stream while whisking. "Let boil up once" means bring it just to a boil to thicken — a roux sauce needs that boil to reach full thickening power, but sustained boiling will scorch the milk.
- Parsley timingFlat-leaf or curly, chopped, stirred in at the end. Added with the milk and boiled it goes drab; added last it keeps its colour and smell.
- SeasoningMilk-based sauces take more salt than cooks expect. Season the sauce before the potatoes go in, then taste again once it is all hot — the fried potatoes absorb a surprising amount.
- ServingServes four as a supper dish or side. It is best straight from the pan; on standing the potatoes soften and the sauce thickens, so loosen with a splash of milk if it is held.
Daily calendar cookbooks like this one gave a household a dish a day, each tagged with a nationality, and the tags were often loose — "Scotch" here signals plain, thrifty and potato-based more than it points to any documented Scottish recipe. The dish itself belongs to the very large family of potatoes-in-white-sauce found across northern Europe: creamed potatoes, the German Kartoffeln in Weißer Soße. What distinguishes this version is that the potatoes are fried in fat first rather than boiled, which gives browned edges that hold up in the sauce. Potatoes became a staple of the Scottish diet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.