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Egg and Potato Pie
5 hard cooked eggs 3 tablespoonfuls hot cream 1/2 pint (1 cup) white sauce Seasoning salt, pepper, and 10 boiled potatoes grated nutmeg I heaping tablespoonful (I Chopped parsley oz.) butter Shell the eggs and cut them into slices not too thin. Mash the potatoes and mix them with the butter and the cream. Season with salt, pepper, and a very little nutmeg.
Line the bottom of an earthenware dish with this and place in it a layer of the sliced eggs, scatter some chopped parsley over them, and cover with the white sauce. Continue alternate layers of potato, egg, sauce, and parsley until the quantities are used. Cover the top with the mashed potatoes; smooth carefully over and mark with a fork; brush with beaten egg; bake for half an hour in a moderately hot oven.
A layered potato-and-egg pie of the sort built to use up cold boiled potatoes and a pan of leftover white sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the ingredient quantities need translating before you start.
- "Moderately hot oven"375-400F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the bake is only to heat through and colour the forked potato top. Half an hour is right; run it under the broiler for a minute if the crust is pale.
- Ten boiled potatoesThe recipe counts potatoes rather than weighing them; assuming medium ones, figure about 2 1/2 to 3 lb, which gives roughly six cups mashed. Judge by the dish: you want enough for a base, two or three interior layers, and a covering lid.
- The white sauceHalf a pint is one cup of basic béchamel — 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked out for a few minutes. Make it on the loose side; it has to spread over egg slices without tearing them, and it will firm up in the oven.
- An extra eggThe instruction to brush the top with beaten egg calls for a sixth egg that never made it into the ingredient list. One yolk loosened with a teaspoon of milk is plenty for the glaze.
- Hard-cooked eggsCut them into slices "not too thin" — about a quarter inch, or the yolks crumble away from the whites as you lift them. An egg slicer does this more neatly than a knife, and the yolks should be just set rather than chalky, since they get a second half-hour of heat.
- Nutmeg and seasoningNutmeg with potato, cream and béchamel is the whole character of the dish, but "a very little" is meant literally — a few scrapes across the whole bowl. Salt the potatoes more assertively than feels right; the eggs and sauce are both bland.
- The dishAn earthenware casserole of at least two to three quarts, since the mashed potato alone runs to about six cups; ungreased is fine given the butter in the potato. Serve straight from it -- the layers will not survive being turned out.
- YieldFour as a main course with a green salad, six as a side. It reheats well, covered, at 350F.
This comes from an era when the casserole was the vessel rather than the genre: a glazed earthenware pot that went from oven to table, valued as economical because it needed no separate serving dish and held heat through a long meal. Recipes of this kind lean on the same logic -- cold cooked potatoes, hard-cooked eggs, and a cup of white sauce, layered and browned into something that reads as a made dish rather than leftovers. Egg-and-potato pies of this kind were common meatless fare in British and American households, and the forked pattern on the potato top is the same finish cooks gave a shepherd's pie.