Boil potatoes until tender and slice them thin. Heat two ounces of butter; add a dessert-spoonful of flour. Then stir in some rich milk until it thickens; add the potatoes, salt, pepper and chopped parsley. Let boil up; add a little hot cream and serve at once.
A plain white-sauce potato dish with almost no quantities given beyond the butter and flour. The proportions below make it workable without changing its character.
- Dessert-spoonfulAn English dessert spoon falls between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons. With two ounces (4 tablespoons) of butter that is a very fat-heavy, loose roux, and the sauce it makes will coat rather than set.
- Rich milk and cream"Rich milk" in a period of unstandardised dairy means milk with the cream not yet skimmed off, closer to today's whole milk with a splash of half-and-half. Figure about a cup of liquid for two ounces of butter and two teaspoons of flour, added gradually.
- Boil the potatoes wholeCook them in their skins until a knife slides in, then peel while warm and slice. Sliced-then-boiled potatoes shed starch into the water and fall apart when they meet the sauce.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirOnce the slices go in, move them with a spatula and as little as possible. Vigorous stirring breaks them down and turns the dish into a thick mash bound in sauce.
- "Let boil up"This means bring it just to the point of bubbling to cook out the raw flour and thicken, no more than a minute. The finishing cream goes in off the heat or at a bare simmer so it does not break.
- SeasoningBoiled potatoes absorb a surprising amount of salt. Season the sauce assertively before the potatoes go in, then taste again at the end. A grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate and welcome.
- YieldTwo ounces of butter and a cup of milk will dress about two pounds of potatoes, serving four to six as a side. Serve straight from the pan; it stiffens badly as it cools.
Creamed potatoes in a butter-and-flour sauce belong to the broad family of dishes built on what French cookery codified as sauce béchamel, a sauce widely used in home cooking by the late nineteenth century. The Swiss attribution here is loose, as it often is in the "dishes of all nations" genre that flourished around 1900: these books assigned a nationality to each day of the year, and the label frequently signalled a plausible regional association rather than a documented origin. The book's structure — one dish a day, one country a day — is visible on the page itself, where October 6 is Japanese and October 8 Belgian.