Home › Vegetables › Hashed Browned Potatoes in the Oven
Hashed Browned Potatoes in the Oven
Cut into dice four good-sized cold boiled potatoes, put them in a baking-dish and just cover with cream. Add a teaspoonful of butter cut into bits and bake in a moderate oven about thirty minutes. Serve in the dish in which they are baked. These are delicious served with broiled or panned steak.
A gratin in all but name, and simpler than most: the only real variables are how dry your potatoes are and how much cream you pour over them.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Thirty minutes at that heat should set the cream and colour the top edges; the recipe says nothing about further browning, but if the surface is still pale a couple of minutes under the broiler will finish it.
- The potatoes must be coldBoiled potatoes chilled overnight hold their dice; warm ones crumble as you cut and turn to mash in the cream. A waxy or all-purpose variety keeps its shape better than a russet.
- "Just cover with cream"For four medium potatoes, roughly 3/4 to 1 cup. The cream should come to the top of the dice, not float them. Period "cream" was often thinner than today's heavy cream, so half-and-half may be closer to the original, though it is more likely to break in the oven than heavy cream.
- ButterA teaspoonful is modest by today's habits; there is plenty of fat in the cream already. Dot it over the surface rather than stirring it in, so it bastes the top as it melts.
- Season itThe recipe names no salt or pepper. Salt the potatoes as you dice them and again over the cream, or the dish reads flat.
- Dish and yieldUse a shallow baking dish, about 8 inches square or a 9-inch pie plate, so more surface browns. Four potatoes serve three or four alongside steak.
- Not hash browns as we know themDespite the title there is no skillet and no crust; this is baked, soft, and spoonable. Expect something between scalloped potatoes and a gratin.
The oven version here reads as a thrift recipe: it starts from cold boiled potatoes, of the kind left from a previous dinner, and cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often used "hashed browned potatoes" loosely for dishes of chopped cooked potatoes browned in fat. Second-day treatments for cooked potato -- cakes fried in drippings, creamed and baked dishes like this one -- were common in period vegetable cookery. The suggested pairing with broiled or "panned" steak is the plain-cut-and-rich-potato combination familiar from American chophouse cooking of the era.