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POTATOES, WITH WHITE SAUCE (another way)
Thicken some butter with flour in a stewpan, add some milk or cream, with chives and parsley cut small, season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and boil these ingredients to the consistency of sauce. When ready, put in some cooked potatoes cut into slices, let them remain till hot through, and serve.
A béchamel with herbs, used to reheat cooked potatoes. The original gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are the standard ones for a pouring sauce.
- Sauce proportionsFor about 1 lb of cooked potatoes, use 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 1/2 cups milk or cream. Cook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before the liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour.
- "Thicken some butter with flour"This is a roux, made in the pan. Add the milk gradually and off the heat at first, whisking, to avoid lumps; the sauce thickens as it comes back to the boil.
- StewpanA straight-sided pan with a lid. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works; a thin pan will scorch the milk at the bottom before the sauce thickens.
- Boil to the consistency of sauceTwo to three minutes at a bare boil is enough. Longer and it tightens past coating consistency, in which case loosen it with more milk.
- Chives and parsleyAdd the parsley with the milk if you like it soft, but hold the chives back until the last minute — they lose their onion note if boiled.
- NutmegFreshly grated, and a small amount. Pre-ground nutmeg is duller and it is easy to overdo, at which point the sauce tastes medicinal.
- The potatoesWaxy potatoes, boiled the day before and thoroughly cold, slice cleanly; floury ones break up in the sauce. They only need warming through, three or four minutes, with the pan barely simmering and gentle stirring.
- YieldServes four as a side dish.
This is a thrift dish dressed as a sauce lesson: the point being taught is the roux-based white sauce, with cold cooked potatoes standing in as the most available thing to put it on. Plain potatoes were often boiled in quantity in nineteenth-century English kitchens, and a white sauce with herbs was one way of making yesterday's boiled potatoes worth serving again. The pairing of chives and parsley with nutmeg in a milk sauce suggests French influence, and similar treatments appear in other Victorian books under names like pommes de terre à la crème; here it is given no name and no quantities, on the assumption that a cook who has learned the sauce can judge the rest.