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Scalloped Potatoes
1 qt. sliced raw potatoes 2 cups scalded milk 4 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Cover the bottom of a buttered baking dish with a layer of sliced potatoes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot with pieces of butter and dredge with Gold Medal flour. Repeat until the materials are used.
Pour over all the scalded milk and bake in a moderate oven from forty-five to fifty minutes.
A dredged-layer scallop that builds its own sauce in the dish rather than from a pre-made white sauce. Two things decide whether it works: how thin the potatoes are cut and whether the milk is genuinely hot when it goes in.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350 to 375F. At that heat 45 to 50 minutes suits thinly cut slices; thicker slices may still be firm and want extra time, loosely covered.
- A quart of sliced potatoesThis is a volume measure of the raw slices, not a weight of whole potatoes. Roughly 1 1/2 lb of peeled potatoes, or three medium russets, fills a quart once sliced.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below a simmer, when it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. Hot milk lets the flour begin thickening at once and shortens the baking; cold milk leaves a watery layer at the bottom.
- Dredge means a light dustingThree tablespoons of flour are spread across all the layers, a scant sprinkle each time. Piling it on one layer gives pasty streaks rather than an even sauce.
- Dish sizeThe quart of slices plus 2 cups of milk needs about a 2-quart dish, such as an 8-inch square or an equivalent oval. The milk should come nearly level with the top layer of potatoes but not over it.
- Starch mattersDo not rinse the cut slices. The surface starch helps bind the milk, and modern advice to soak potatoes for crispness works against a scallop.
- BrowningThere is no cheese or crumb topping here. If the top is pale at the end, a few minutes under the broiler will brown it.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. It sets up on standing, so give it ten minutes out of the oven before serving.
Scalloped dishes are generally said to take their name from the old sense of scallop as a shallow shell-shaped dish, and by the nineteenth century "to scallop" simply meant to bake something in layers in a shallow vessel with milk or crumbs. This version belongs to the flour-milling promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century, in which every recipe that could reasonably call for flour did so by brand name; the dredged-flour method is the one Fannie Farmer herself used, with flour dredged between the layers and hot milk poured over. Potatoes and milk were cheap and available year-round, which is why the dish turns up so often in American household manuals of the period, usually as the vegetable served alongside a roast or a ham.