Peel and cook some new potatoes with 1 sliced onion, salt and pepper, until tender. Then brown 1 tablespoonful of flour in 2 teaspoonfuls of butter; add ½ cup of water; let boil well with some chopped parsley, salt and pepper; then add the potatoes and let simmer five minutes. Serve hot.
A plain German potato side dish: boiled new potatoes finished in a browned-flour gravy. The original assumes you know how much potato to cook, so a few numbers help.
- QuantityFigure about 1½ lb of small new potatoes and one medium onion, which serves four as a side. The half cup of water and single tablespoon of flour make only a light coating sauce, not a stew.
- Cooking the potatoesBoil them whole in salted water with the sliced onion, 15 to 20 minutes depending on size, then drain. The text says only "add the potatoes" at the end, but there is no direction to discard the onion, so it presumably stays with them.
- Halve them if large"New potatoes" in this period meant genuinely small early-summer tubers. Anything bigger than a walnut should be halved so the sauce has something to cling to.
- The browned flourThis is the hinge. One tablespoon of flour in two teaspoons of butter is a stiff, dry paste — cook it over medium heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of light toast. That colour is the whole flavour of the dish; pale roux gives you nothing.
- Adding the waterAdd the half cup off the heat or in a slow stream while whisking, or the hot roux will seize into lumps. Reserving potato cooking water instead of plain water improves the sauce.
- "Let boil well"Two or three minutes of actual boiling is enough to cook out the raw-flour taste and thicken the sauce. Add the parsley at the end rather than boiling it, unless you want the colour cooked out.
- ServingGood with roast pork, sausages, or anything with mustard alongside. A splash of vinegar at the end is not in the text, but vinegar is common in southern German potato dishes and will not be out of place.
Potatoes in browned-flour gravy belong to the everyday cooking of southern Germany and Austria, where a *braune Mehlschwitze* — flour toasted in fat until nut-coloured — is the base for a great many sauces and soups. It is a thrift technique as much as a flavour one: browned flour and water stretch a little butter into a sauce for a pot of potatoes. The dish's presence in a dated day-by-day collection of foreign dishes reflects a popular genre of the early twentieth century, in which American home cooks were offered one novelty dish per day, each labelled with a country. The labels were loose, and "Bavarian" here signals little more than the German-style handling of potatoes with onion and parsley that was already familiar in much of the United States through immigrant kitchens.