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Potatoes, with Sauce
Put some butter in a stewpan, thicken it with flour, and fry some onions in it till they become brown. Pour over them some stock, and season with salt and pepper, nutmeg, and vinegar. When the onions are sufficiently cooked, add some cooked potatoes; let them remain until they are hot, and then serve immediately.
A brown onion sauce built on a roux, used to reheat yesterday's boiled potatoes. The original assumes you know the proportions, so here they are.
- Working quantitiesFor about 1 lb (450 g) of cooked potatoes: 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 2 medium onions sliced thin, and 1 1/2 cups stock. Serves four as a side.
- StewpanA Victorian stewpan is simply a straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any wide saucepan or sauté pan works; you want enough surface area to brown the onions rather than steam them.
- The hinge is the browningButter, flour and onions all need to take real colour before the stock goes in — a nutty brown roux and soft, deeply browned onions. Rushed here, the sauce is pale and tastes of raw flour.
- Order of operationsFlour scorches faster than onions soften. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two, then add the onions and let them brown slowly over medium-low heat, ten to fifteen minutes, stirring often.
- StockThe original says only "stock"; a brown household stock suits the dish best. A good beef or chicken stock does the job; if using commercial stock, hold back on salt until the sauce has reduced.
- Vinegar and nutmegBoth are seasonings, not flavours to announce themselves. A teaspoon of cider or white wine vinegar and a few scrapes of nutmeg for the quantity above; add the vinegar at the end and taste.
- PotatoesUse waxy potatoes, boiled and cooled, cut into thick slices or chunks. Floury varieties disintegrate into the sauce. They only need three or four minutes to heat through — folded gently, not stirred hard.
This belongs to the long tradition of dishes designed around cold cooked potatoes, which Victorian kitchens are often said to have had on hand because potatoes were boiled in bulk for the household and rarely finished at one meal. Cassell's appears to devote a run of entries to reheating them respectably: with milk, with cheese, with gravy, and here with a brown onion sauce. The combination of browned roux, onions, vinegar and nutmeg is the kind of sharp-sweet seasoning sometimes associated with central European cookery, and the vinegar lifts a sauce that would otherwise taste flat and floury. The instruction to "serve immediately" is the practical heart of it: potatoes held in sauce over heat break down quickly.