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Potatoes, Sliced, with Parmesan
Cut some firm boiled potatoes into slices. Place them in layers in a dish, and pour over each layer a small portion of white sauce. Put a little of the sauce smoothly over the top, and sprinkle over this some grated Parmesan cheese and bread-crumbs so as to cover it entirely. Drop a little butter here and there on the top, put the dish in a well-heated oven until the potatoes are warmed through, and then serve. Cold potatoes may be warmed in this way, and they will be very good if the Parmesan is omitted and cream used instead of white sauce. Time to heat the potatoes, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. for a moderate-sized dish.
A potato gratin built from leftovers, with no quantities given beyond "some." The proportions are forgiving; what matters is that the potatoes are cooked through before they go in, since twenty minutes in the oven only heats and browns.
- "Well-heated oven"No temperature is given; a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400F, fits the instruction. The potatoes are already boiled, so the twenty minutes is for heating through, with whatever colour the cheese and crumbs take on.
- White sauceA standard béchamel of the period: roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of milk, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg. Make it slightly loose, as it will thicken in the oven and the potatoes absorb some of it.
- QuantitiesFor a dish serving four, figure on about 1.5 lb boiled potatoes, half a pint of sauce, 2 oz grated Parmesan and 2 tablespoons of dry breadcrumbs.
- Firm potatoes matterThe recipe specifies firm boiled potatoes, and a waxy sort, cooled before slicing, holds its shape. Floury potatoes tend to break up into the sauce and the layers are lost.
- BreadcrumbsCrumbs from a day-old loaf, rubbed through a coarse sieve, give an even covering; very fine crumbs pack down.
- The cream variationThe alternative given at the end, cream instead of sauce and no Parmesan, is a plain cream gratin of cooked potatoes with a crumb top. A rich cream stands up to the oven better than a thin one.
- CostOne shilling for a moderate-sized dish is in keeping with the book's period pricing; the imported Parmesan would have been the dearer ingredient, the potatoes the cheapest.
The dish belongs to the run of preparations for using up cold cooked food, a preoccupation of every late-Victorian household manual: potatoes were boiled in quantity for the main meal, and the surplus reappeared the next day fried, hashed or, as here, layered under sauce and browned. Parmesan had long been imported into Britain as a hard keeping cheese that grated well and travelled without spoiling, which recommended it for gratins well before it became a commonplace of the domestic kitchen. The technique -- sauce, cheese, crumbs, dots of butter, hot oven -- is the general English form of what French cooking called au gratin.