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Potatoes au Gratin
2 tablespoonfuls of butter; 1 pint baked potatoes; 1 tablespoonful of flour; 1/3 cupful grated cheese; 2 cupfuls of milk; 1/2 cupful fine bread crumbs; yolks of 2 eggs; seasoning.
Melt the butter, then add the flour, and boil for a minute. Stir in the milk until the sauce thickens perfectly smooth. Add the seasoning and the beaten eggs. Slice the potatoes and place in a deep baking-dish. Pour the sauce over them, then sprinkle over the top the grated cheese and the bread crumbs. Brown lightly in a hot oven for ten minutes. Serve at once.
A leftover-potato dish built on a thin egg-enriched béchamel. The one thing to get right is the eggs: add the yolks off the heat, or they will scramble in the hot sauce and the gratin will be grainy.
- Yolks off the heatTake the thickened sauce off the burner, beat a ladleful into the yolks to temper them, then stir that back in. The recipe says only "add the beaten eggs" after the seasoning, which assumes a cook who already knows this.
- A pint of potatoesThis is a volume measure, not a weight: 2 cups of sliced cooked potato, which will be somewhere near a pound of baked potatoes, depending on how you slice and pack them. The recipe specifies baked rather than boiled, and the drier flesh will hold its shape better under the sauce.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a coating one. The two yolks add some body, and the sauce firms up a little around the potato in the oven. If you want it firmer, go to two tablespoons of flour and expect a denser gratin.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F. Ten minutes at that heat browns the crumbs and cheese without giving the sauce time to break, which is the point of the short bake.
- Everything goes in warmNothing here is being cooked through, only browned. Use potatoes and sauce that are still hot, or ten minutes will leave you with a cold centre under a browned top.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese"; a dry, sharp grating cheese suits it, aged Cheddar or a hard cheese such as Parmesan. Toss it with the bread crumbs before scattering, so the crumbs keep the cheese from sealing into a rubbery sheet.
- Crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" could mean either soft crumbs rubbed from stale bread or dried and sifted ones; the recipe does not say. Fresh crumbs brown well in a short, hot bake; if using dried, mix a little melted butter through them first.
- YieldServes four as a side, two as a supper dish. Bake in a shallow dish rather than a deep one if you want more browned surface per portion.
Gratin cookery is French in origin \the the crust scraped from the dish, from gratter, to scrape -- and by the end of the nineteenth century "au gratin" had been widely absorbed into English and American household cooking as shorthand for anything finished with cheese and crumbs and browned on top. What suggests a domestic compilation recipe rather than a restaurant one is its starting point: already-baked potatoes, a dish for a kitchen where the oven had been lit for something else and cold potatoes were sitting in the larder. Egg yolks beaten into a white sauce are a common enrichment in recipes of the period, giving body and colour without the cost of cream.