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POTATOES (a la Creme)
Boil some potatoes of a firm kind in the usual way. Take a small, sharp, thin-bladed knife and cut them into thin slices. Put a pint of these into a stewpan with a tea-spoonful of salt, an ounce of butter, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Pour a quarter of a pint of cream over the top, cover the saucepan closely, and shake it over the fire for eight or ten minutes. Place the potatoes on a hot dish, and be very careful not to break the slices. Cold potatoes which are left from dinner may, if firm, be dressed in this way for breakfast. If cream is not at hand, milk slightly thickened with flour and butter may be substituted for it. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A gratin without the oven: cooked potato slices finished in cream over direct heat. Everything depends on keeping the slices whole, which is why the pan is shaken rather than stirred.
- Measure the potatoes by volume"A pint of these" means a pint of slices, not of raw potato — an imperial pint, so about 2 1/2 US cups loosely packed, perhaps a pound of boiled potatoes. The book calls that sufficient for four or five; by modern serving sizes it will stretch further as a small side than a generous one.
- Use a waxy variety"Firm kind" rules out floury bakers, which will collapse into mash the moment the pan moves. Charlotte, Yukon Gold, red-skinned or new potatoes slice cleanly and hold shape.
- Cool them before slicingBoiled potatoes slice far more neatly when cold, and the recipe's cold leftovers from dinner will handle well for that reason, though the book offers them simply as a way of using them up. Even freshly boiled ones benefit from twenty minutes' rest.
- A quarter of a pint of creamIn an English kitchen of this period that is a gill, 5 fl oz, so about two-thirds of a cup. Double cream or heavy cream; single cream is likelier to break.
- Cut the saltA teaspoon of salt plus a further "little salt" is far too much for a pound of already-salted boiled potatoes. Use a scant half teaspoon total and correct at the end.
- Lemon juice and creamAcid plus dairy over direct heat is how a sauce curdles. Keep the pan at a bare simmer, and if you are nervous, add the lemon juice off the heat in the last thirty seconds.
- Shake, do not stirEight to ten minutes over low heat with the lid on, moving the pan in short slides rather than lifting and folding. A spoon will break the slices, which the original names as the one thing to avoid.
- The flour-and-butter substituteIf using milk, make a small roux first — equal weights butter and flour, about a teaspoon each, cooked a minute before the milk goes in — otherwise you get floury milk rather than sauce.
"A la crème" in a late-Victorian English cookery dictionary signals a French finish applied to the plainest of English staples, and the frugality of the entry is the point: Cassell's gives a probable cost of eightpence and suggests the dish specifically as a way of using cold potatoes left from dinner at the next morning's breakfast. Nutmeg with potatoes and cream is an old pairing that survives in gratin dauphinois and in Dutch and German potato cookery, where the spice was cheap enough by the nineteenth century to be a household seasoning rather than a luxury.