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Potatoes, Savoury
Half-boil six or eight large potatoes, and cut them into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Dissolve two ounces of butter in a stewpan, or, if preferred, substitute for the butter two ounces of fat bacon cut into small pieces. Add a minced onion, and let it stew until tender. Dredge a table-spoonful of flour into the butter, and stir until it is smooth and brown; then pour in gradually as much boiling stock or water as will make the sauce of the consistency of cream. Add a pinch of thyme and marjoram, a large table-spoonful of chopped parsley, some pepper and salt, and a little grated nutmeg, a bay-leaf, or any other flavouring. Let the sauce simmer a few minutes, put in the sliced potatoes, and when they are tender without being broken, turn the whole upon a dish, and serve very hot. If liked, the butter and flour may be kept from browning, and a little milk may be used to thin the sauce. Time, one hour or more. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A potato stew built on a brown roux — essentially potatoes finished in gravy. The technique is straightforward; the points below cover the vessel, the doneness question, and the seasoning.
- Half-boil, and mean itThe potatoes should be boiled only until a knife meets resistance in the centre; for large ones this is likely to take somewhere around 10-15 minutes after the water returns to a boil, depending on size. Fully cooked slices collapse in the sauce and you end up with a coarse mash.
- SlicingCool the parboiled potatoes before slicing, or they will crumble on the board. Quarter-inch rounds are right; thinner and they break up during the final simmer.
- StewpanA stewpan here is simply a wide, heavy saucepan or sauté pan with a lid — deep enough to hold the sliced potatoes in two or three loose layers and shallow enough that the sauce reduces rather than steams.
- The rouxOne tablespoon of flour to two ounces (4 tbsp) of fat gives a loose roux; cook it over medium heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of weak coffee, two to three minutes. Add the boiling liquid a ladle at a time, whisking, or it will lump.
- Stock quantityThe recipe gives none — go by consistency. Expect roughly 1 to 1½ cups for six to eight potatoes, added gradually until it coats a spoon like thin cream. It will thicken further as the potato starch leaches out.
- Fat baconThis means the fat part of the bacon or fat pork, rendered slowly so the fat runs before the onion goes in. Period bacon might be green or smoked; modern smoked bacon works but pushes the dish in a distinctly different direction.
- Herbs and the bay leafDried thyme and marjoram at a pinch each; fish the bay leaf out before serving. The nutmeg should be barely detectable — grate a few passes, no more.
- TimingThe stated "one hour or more" presumably covers the whole process, parboiling included. The final simmer in the sauce is 10-15 minutes, with the pan shaken rather than stirred so the slices stay whole.
- YieldThree or four persons, as the book says. Served as a supper in its own right it would stretch less far.
This belongs to a large family of Victorian dishes whose purpose was to make cooked potatoes go further and taste of something — the same impulse behind potato pie, potato cakes and the endless variations on "potatoes à la maître d'hôtel". Cassell's sets it among the other potato entries, alongside plain boiled, mashed and baked, where the browned-flour sauce marks it as a savoury treatment rather than a plain vegetable. The instruction to keep the roux pale and thin the sauce with milk instead is a matter of colour and lightness, just as water stands as an alternative to stock in kitchens where stock was not always to hand. The costing of one shilling, given without comment, is a reminder that this sort of book was written for cooks who answered to a housekeeper's accounts as much as to a palate.