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Creamed New Potatoes
Cut two and one-half cups cold, boiled new potatoes in one-half inch cubes. Add one and one-half cups White Sauce. Season highly with salt and white pepper, and reheat in double boiler. Remove to hot serving dish and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A leftover dish in disguise: it assumes you boiled potatoes the day before and have a standing white sauce recipe elsewhere in the book. Two details carry it — the sauce consistency and the gentle reheat.
- The white sauceA medium white sauce runs roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt; follow the book's own White Sauce recipe where it differs. For 1½ cups, that scales to 3 tablespoons each and 1½ cups milk. It should coat a spoon but still pour.
- Cold potatoes are the pointBoiled, chilled potatoes hold their cubes; freshly boiled hot ones slump and cloud the sauce with starch. Boil them whole in their skins the day before, peel or leave the thin new-potato skins on, then cube.
- "New" potatoesGenuinely young, thin-skinned potatoes with waxy flesh — new-crop reds or fingerlings. A floury baking potato will disintegrate into the sauce.
- Double boilerThe indirect heat exists so the sauce does not catch and the potatoes do not break up while being stirred. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you fold rather than stir, and stop as soon as it steams.
- "Season highly"Period phrasing for assertive seasoning, not heat. Salt generously — potatoes and milk both mute it — and use white pepper only so the sauce stays unspeckled.
- YieldAbout four servings as a side dish.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller, a Chicago cooking-school teacher, and issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene shortening — one of the many early twentieth-century cookbooks that doubled as advertising for a branded fat. New potatoes were a summer marker, dug young before the maincrop was lifted for storage, and a cook working through late summer would have had them in quantity. The dish itself is pure white-sauce economy, the technique that anchored American domestic-science cooking of the period. Chopped parsley over the top was the standard finish for anything pale, and served the same purpose then as now.