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FRICASSEED AND FRIED POTATOES
Slice cold boiled potatoes, put into a dripping-pan, add milk, salt, pepper, and small lump of butter, allowing half a pint of milk to a dozen potatoes, place in oven for about fifteen minutes, stir occasionally with a knife to keep from burning; they should brown slightly on the top; or put in sauce-pan lump of butter, when melted add a level table-spoon flour, cook a few minutes and add a tea-cup new milk or cream, season with salt and pepper; when it boils, add sliced potatoes, and boil till potatoes are thoroughly heated. To fry, slice and fry in butter or ham or beef-drippings, using only enough fat to prevent sticking; sprinkle with salt, cover with tin lid so that they may both fry and steam.
Three treatments of yesterday's boiled potatoes: baked in milk, simmered in a quick white sauce, or pan-fried under a lid. The hinge in all three is that the potatoes are already cooked, so you are only heating them through and building surface or sauce.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Against "a dozen potatoes" this is a thin ratio, and it assumes small nineteenth-century boiling potatoes — figure a cup of milk to roughly 2 lb of sliced cooked potato, and add more if the pan looks dry before the top browns.
- A tea-cupNot a modern measuring cup; a Victorian teacup runs about 3/4 cup. Err on the low side for the sauce version and loosen it later if the flour and milk tighten too much.
- Dripping-panA shallow metal roasting pan, the sort set under a joint to catch fat. Any low-sided baking dish or sheet pan with a rim works; a deep casserole will steam the potatoes rather than brown them.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; a wood or coal range had no dial. Fifteen minutes with slight browning on top suggests a fairly hot oven, somewhere around 400F; at a moderate heat expect to leave it longer and get less colour.
- New milkFresh whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed. Use whole milk or, as the recipe permits, cream; skim milk gives a watery sauce that will not cling to the slices.
- Boil till thoroughly heatedFor the sauce version, cook the flour in the butter a full minute or two before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty. Once the potatoes are in, keep it at a bare simmer and stir gently — hard boiling breaks cold boiled potato slices into mash.
- Cover with a tin lidThe point of the lid in the fried version is to trap steam so the interiors soften while the cut faces colour. Leave the slices undisturbed for several minutes at a time; frequent turning is what makes fried potatoes ragged.
- Ham or beef drippingsBoth are still worth saving, and bacon fat behaves the same way. Use a nonstick or well-seasoned cast-iron pan if working with the small amount of fat specified, since cooked potato starch sticks readily.
- YieldDepending on how many potatoes you start with, each of the first two versions will serve roughly four as a side. All three are best eaten straight from the pan.
Buckeye Cookery returns repeatedly to the argument that nothing edible should be thrown out, gathering uses for cold meat, stale bread, leftover rice and, here, the boiled potatoes that came off a previous day's table. The word fricassee is used loosely: strictly it describes meat cut up and stewed in a light sauce, and American cookbooks of the period were applying it more broadly to dishes finished in a white or milk sauce, potatoes included. The recipe depends on a household routine that has largely disappeared, in which potatoes were boiled in quantity as a matter of course and the surplus was a planned resource rather than an accident. The instruction to use "only enough fat to prevent sticking" is characteristic of the book's frugality, and it sets these apart from deep-fried potatoes.