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Potatoes Au Gratin
2 lbs. potatoes Salt, pepper, and grated 1 egg nutmeg to taste ½ pints (3 cups) boiling milk I I garlic clove 1½ lb. grated cheese 2 tablespoonfuls butter Peel and finely slice the potatoes. Put them into Wash the lettuce, cutting off the stalks at the roots, and put it into an earthenware pan with the onion, parsley, water, salt, and pepper; cook slowly for two hours. By this time the water should have pretty well cooked away, leaving the lettuce fairly dry.
Remove from it the onion and parsley, add the melted butter, and serve hot.
The page as printed is a scrambling of two recipes: a potato gratin whose method breaks off mid-sentence, and the tail end of a braised lettuce recipe that has run in behind it. Read the ingredient list as the gratin and ignore the lettuce instructions entirely, which belong to another dish.
- What is missingThe gratin method stops at "Put them into" — presumably a buttered casserole rubbed with the cut garlic clove, layered with cheese, covered with the boiling milk beaten with the egg, and baked. Everything after that point on the page concerns lettuce, onion and parsley and has nothing to do with potatoes.
- The milk quantity"1/2 pints (3 cups)" is a broken line. Three cups is 1½ pints, so the original almost certainly read 1½ pints. Three cups of milk to 2 lb of sliced potatoes is a sound ratio for a gratin baked uncovered.
- The cheese quantity"1½ lb. grated cheese" against 2 lb of potatoes is out of proportion for this style of dish and is very likely a mangled ¼ lb or ½ lb. Treat it as ambiguous rather than trusting the figure; 4 to 6 oz of a dry cheese such as Gruyère or a firm Cheddar suits the quantities given.
- Slice thicknessThe book says only "finely slice"; around 1/8 inch is a workable reading. Do not rinse the slices after cutting — the surface starch is what thickens the milk into a sauce as it bakes.
- The garlicA single clove for 2 lb of potatoes suggests scenting rather than a flavouring in its own right: halve it and rub the inside of the dish, then discard. The recipe itself gives no instruction either way.
- The eggOne egg beaten into the hot milk will set the custard, but pour the milk into the egg in a thin stream while whisking rather than the reverse, or it will curdle before it reaches the dish.
- Oven and vesselThe page names no vessel for the gratin and gives no oven instruction. A modern approach: bake uncovered at around 350°F for about an hour and a quarter, until a knife passes through the potatoes without resistance and the top is browned; cover loosely with foil if the surface colours before the centre is tender.
- YieldTwo pounds of potatoes with this much milk and cheese serves six as a side dish, four as a supper in its own right. Let it stand ten minutes out of the oven so the custard firms.
Gratin is a French kitchen word usually traced to gratter, to scrape — the browned crust scraped from the bottom and sides of the dish, later the dish itself. Potatoes cooked slowly in milk under a browned top belong to the family of gratin dauphinois, generally associated with the Dauphiné region of south-eastern France; versions with cheese and egg, as here, are common in English-language cookbooks. The garbled state of this particular page is consistent with scanning software reading column breaks and worn type imperfectly and welding the end of one recipe onto the start of another.