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White Pepper, Salt and Nutmeg
Wash, scrape, and boil the potatoes, taking them as near as possible of the same size and shape. When cooked, drain them and dry them, and put them in a vegetable dish. While the potatoes are cooking, melt the butter in a stewpan, add the Béchamel sauce, mix well and stir in one yolk of egg and the juice of half a lemon, season with a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg; stir it over the fire till cooked, but be careful not to let it boil, or the egg will curdle. Pour this sauce over the potatoes and serve very hot.
A plain dish of boiled potatoes finished with an egg-enriched Béchamel. The original prints only the method — the quantities lived in the ingredient heading that this page has lost — so the cook is left to judge amounts.
- The hinge: do not boil the sauceOnce the yolk goes in, keep the sauce between about 160F and 175F, stirring constantly off a low flame. Above that the yolk sets in threads and the sauce breaks, exactly as the original warns.
- Missing quantitiesNo amounts are given here. For 2 lb of potatoes, roughly half a pint (10 fl oz) of Béchamel, an ounce of butter and one yolk is in proportion; treat any figure as an estimate rather than the author's.
- BéchamelIn a book of this class Béchamel means a white roux slackened with milk and often a little veal or chicken stock, simmered with onion, bay and peppercorns and strained. A plain milk béchamel works, but season it more assertively.
- StewpanA shallow, straight-sided saucepan, often copper or tinned copper. Any heavy-based saucepan does; heavy is the point, since thin metal will scorch the yolk-thickened sauce.
- Choosing the potatoesUniform size matters because they cook evenly and look deliberate in the dish. Waxy potatoes hold their shape; floury ones will slump under the sauce.
- Drying the potatoesAfter draining, return them to the dry hot pan for a minute over low heat. Surface water thins the sauce and makes it slide off.
- Lemon and nutmegAdd the lemon juice with the yolk and off direct heat; acid dropped into a hot milk sauce encourages curdling. Grate the nutmeg fresh — the pre-ground kind is flat by comparison.
- Yield and serviceProbably enough for about four as a vegetable course, though no quantities are given, so treat the yield as a guess. It does not hold: the sauce stiffens and separates on standing, so sauce the potatoes at the moment of serving.
The dish belongs to the Anglo-French kitchen that dominated ambitious British cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, when a cook trained in a large household would often keep a B outine and build a dozen small sauces from it. B u00e9chamel itself is generally traced to the court cookery of seventeenth-century France and named for Louis de B u00e9chameil, a steward of Louis XIV, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the sauce almost certainly predates him. Enriching a finished white sauce with an egg yolk and lemon u2014 the liaison u2014 was the standard way of giving body and gloss without further reduction, and it is the step that separates a cook's sauce from a nursery one.