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Creamed Potatoes au Gratin
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 quart peeled and diced potatoes 2 cupfuls milk 1 tablespoonful flour 1 cupful grated cheese 1 teaspoonful salt 1/4 teaspoonful white pepper Few breadcrumbs Cut potatoes in about 1 1/2-inch pieces, then boil carefully in boiling salted water. When done, drain, and pour into Criscoed fireproof dish. Blend Crisco and flour in saucepan over fire, add milk, stir till boiling, then add cheese and seasonings. Pour over potatoes; grate a little cheese over top, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and bake five minutes in hot oven.
A straightforward potato gratin from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks, where shortening stands in for the butter a cook would otherwise have reached for. Two things need attention: the sauce is thinner than modern practice expects, and five minutes will not brown anything.
- The sauce is the hingeOne tablespoon of flour to two cupfuls of milk gives a sauce barely thicker than milk, and once the cheese melts into it the dish will pool rather than cling. Two to three tablespoons of flour to the same milk holds the potatoes together properly.
- A quart of diced potatoesMeasured after peeling and dicing, that is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of potato (a little more on the scales before peeling). Waxy or all-purpose potatoes hold their 1 1/2-inch pieces better than a floury baking potato, which will collapse in the boiling water.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once since this book was written; it is no longer the cottonseed product of the 1910s. Butter works in both places the recipe calls for shortening and tastes better with cheese.
- "Hot oven"425-450F. In a book of this date the phrase assumes a coal or early gas range with no dial, so treat it as the top of the useful range rather than a precise setting.
- Five minutes is not enoughThat timing only makes sense if the potatoes, sauce and dish all go in hot straight from the stove, and even then it will not colour the crumbs. Give it 15-20 minutes at 425F, or finish under the broiler for two or three minutes to brown the top.
- The cheeseA cupful grated implies a firm dry cheese; a well-aged Cheddar or an American "store cheese" would be a plausible choice for the period, though the recipe does not say. Add it to the sauce off direct heat so it melts rather than tightens into strings.
- White pepperSpecified here so no dark specks show in a pale dish. Black pepper will do, though it is not an identical flavour: white pepper is earthier and less aromatic.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish, in a shallow dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. Shallow matters: the surface area is what gives you crust.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s — the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks to use a single new product. Crisco reached the market in 1911, and the recipe books that followed it were written by professional cookery authors (Marion Harris Neil among them) who worked the shortening into every category, including places where butter had no rival on flavour, as here. The dish itself is ordinary au gratin practice: French gratin refers not to the cheese but to the browned crust scraped from the dish, and by the late nineteenth century American and English cookbooks used "au gratin" as shorthand for cheese sauce plus crumbs plus a hot oven. What dates this version is the assumption that a cook would happily accept vegetable shortening in a cheese sauce — a claim the manufacturer's own booklets were doing the work of making plausible.