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Potatoes with White Sauce
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, and serve very hot with a little chopped parsley sprinkled over them.
A plain creamed-potato dish built on a small white sauce, written in the shorthand of a period when every cook knew the butter-and-flour ratio by heart. The only real skill is in the sauce.
- Quantities to work fromThe original gives none. For about 2 lb of cooked potatoes, use 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 1/2 cups milk or light cream; that yields a sauce that coats without gluing.
- "Thicken some butter with flour"This is a roux: melt the butter, stir in an equal volume of flour, and cook it a minute or two over low heat so the flour loses its raw taste. Do not let it colour, or the sauce will be beige rather than white.
- StewpanA wide pan with a lid, roughly what we would call a shallow saucepan. Width matters here because the potatoes go in at the end and want room.
- Adding the milkOff the heat, add the milk in stages and whisk smooth before each addition. Then return to a bare simmer -- "boil to the consistency of sauce" means simmer four to five minutes until it coats a spoon, not a hard boil, which will scorch dairy at the pan bottom.
- Chives and parsleyChives go in with the milk and soften; the parsley is better added in the last minute so it stays green. The final sprinkle should be raw, chopped just before serving.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little -- an eighth of a teaspoon for this quantity. Nutmeg is a common companion to milk-and-flour sauces in period cookery, and pre-ground jars taste dusty by comparison.
- The potatoesBoiled or steamed waxy potatoes, still warm, cut in thick slices or halved if small. Floury bakers will collapse into the sauce. Fold them in gently, warm through for two or three minutes, and serve at once; held long, the potatoes go on absorbing liquid and the sauce stiffens.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish.
Potatoes in white sauce sit in the large family of dishes that European kitchens generated once butter sauces were codified: a bechamel or simple milk sauce as the vehicle, and whatever vegetable was to hand as the substance. The recipe is printed in a compressed style, the sauce itself apparently assumed knowledge. The chives-and-parsley seasoning suggests a spring or summer version. Dressing already-cooked potatoes in a sauce, as here, is a useful way of handling a surplus from an earlier boiling.