Home › The Principles of Cookery › Potatoes, with White Sauce
Potatoes, with White Sauce
Take some cooked potatoes, cut them in pieces, pour white sauce (see WHITE SAUCE) over them, and serve.
A two-line entry that assumes you already have both components on hand — the interest lies entirely in the sauce and in how the potatoes are cut.
- White sauce, as the book means itThe cross-referenced white sauce of this period will be a butter-and-flour roux thinned with milk, or in some versions with milk and a little veal or chicken stock, simmered until it coats a spoon. Allow about 1 cup of sauce to 1 lb of potatoes.
- Which potatoesUse waxy or all-purpose potatoes boiled in their skins and peeled while warm. Floury baking potatoes break down into the sauce and give you a loose mash rather than distinct pieces.
- Cut and temperatureCut into thick rounds or 1-inch chunks, not dice — small pieces crumble. Both elements should be hot when they meet; folding cold leftover potatoes into hot sauce chills the dish and thickens the sauce around them.
- Warming throughSlide the potatoes into the finished sauce and hold over low heat two or three minutes, shaking rather than stirring. Once the sauce is made, the potatoes need only to heat, not to cook further.
- Seasoning the original omitsSalt, white pepper and a grating of nutmeg belong in the sauce, added before the potatoes go in. A spoonful of chopped parsley at the end is a common finish.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 lb of potatoes and 1 1/2 cups of sauce serves four as a side dish.
This entry sits in a dictionary-style cookery book, where cross-references do the work that a modern recipe headnote would: the reader is expected to turn to WHITE SAUCE and combine two skills already learned. That structure reflects how household manuals of the period taught cooking — a small stock of mother sauces, endlessly recombined with plain boiled or roasted staples. Creamed potatoes of this kind were very likely a convenient way to use up the previous day's boiled potatoes, and versions appear across English, French and American domestic cookery under names ranging from pommes de terre to plain creamed potatoes. The nutmeg often specified in period béchamel is generally taken to be a survival from much older spicing habits, when the spice is said to have been used far more freely in savoury cooking than it is now.