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Escalloped Potatoes
Mash some potatoes in the usual way with butter and a little hot milk. Butter some scallop-shells or patty-pans, fill them with the mashed potatoes, make them smooth on the top, and then draw the back of a fork over them. Sprinkle finely grated bread crumbs on the top, and lay small pieces of butter here and there upon them. Put the potatoes in a Dutch oven before the fire till they are brightly browned, and serve on a neatly folded napkin in the scallop-shells. Time, about a quarter of an hour to brown the potatoes. Sufficient, one scallop-shall for each person.
This is mashed potato browned in individual dishes rather than the sliced, cream-baked casserole the name suggests today. The whole point is a crisp, well-coloured top over a soft interior, so the browning heat should be fierce and brief.
- "Escalloped" here means the shell, not the sauceIn this period the word points to the vessel: a scallop shell or shell-shaped dish. There is no sliced potato and no cream sauce, so do not expect the modern gratin.
- Scallop-shells and patty-pansReal scallop shells were sold as ovenware and are still usable if you have them. Otherwise use buttered ramekins, muffin cups, or small gratin dishes of about 1/2 cup capacity.
- Dutch oven before the fireThis is the open-fronted tin reflector oven set facing the hearth, which browned by radiant heat from one side. A broiler set 4-5 inches from the element does the same job, or a 450F oven on an upper rack.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is right for a reflector oven; under a modern broiler the tops will colour in 3 to 6 minutes and need watching, since the crumbs go from brown to black quickly.
- The fork mark mattersDragging the fork back over the smoothed surface raises ridges that catch the heat and brown first.
- Crumbs and butterUse dry fine crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and dot the butter generously; the fat is what carries the browning.
- The potato itselfA floury potato mashed fairly stiff holds the piped or forked pattern. Too much hot milk and the ridges slump before they brown.
- Yield and servingOne shell per person, so scale by your guest count; the recipe gives no weight of potatoes. The folded napkin was presumably there to steady the hot shells on the platter.
Serving food in scallop shells is far older than this book, and the English word "escallop" carried the shell's name into the kitchen long before it came to mean anything baked in cream. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cooks used the shells as individual bakers for oysters, minced meats and potatoes alike, and household suppliers sold both natural shells and tin or earthenware imitations shaped like them. The reflector Dutch oven called for here was standard hearth equipment: a tin box, open on one side, that stood on the hearthstone and threw the fire's heat back onto whatever was inside. Closed ranges had largely displaced it by the later nineteenth century, yet such hearth wording often survived unchanged in reprinted receipts. The dish would also serve as a thrift measure of the kind these books favoured, since mashed potato can be turned into a course that looks deliberate.