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Hashed Potatoes with Cream
Chop fine four cold boiled potatoes, put them in a saucepan with a half pint of cream, half a teaspoonful of salt, dash of pepper, grating of nutmeg and two ounces of butter. Shake over a fire until very hot and serve at once. After these are very hot they may be turned into a baking-dish, dusted with bread crumbs and baked in a quick oven until golden brown, and are then called Delmonico potatoes.
A simple creamed potato dish that doubles as the ancestor of the baked casserole. The only real decisions are the size of the chop and how far you reduce the cream.
- Half a pint of creamOne US cup. Use heavy or whipping cream; the fat is what keeps it from splitting as it reduces around the starch.
- Four cold boiled potatoesRoughly 1 to 1.25 lb of medium potatoes. The recipe asks only that they be cold; leftovers from a previous meal are the obvious source. Cold potatoes hold their edges when chopped; warm ones smear.
- "Chop fine" is not mashAim for a rough quarter-inch dice or a coarse hand-chop. Grating or ricing gives you a soup thickened with starch rather than distinct pieces in cream.
- Two ounces of butterHalf a stick, 4 tablespoons. Combined with a cup of cream this is a rich dish; the whole pan serves three or four as a side.
- Shake, do not stirThe recipe says shake over the fire. Shaking the saucepan moves the potatoes without breaking them, and it keeps the cream from catching on the bottom while it thickens.
- A quick ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F for the Delmonico variation; the book gives no temperature. The mixture is already hot, so you are only browning the crumb topping, which should not take long.
- The crumbsDry, fine crumbs, and a little melted butter over them helps them colour evenly. Fresh soft crumbs will absorb the cream and go pasty rather than crisp.
- Serve at onceHeld on the stove, the potato starch continues to swell and the cream tightens to a paste. This dish does not reheat well in its unbaked form.
Delmonico's in New York gave its name to a long list of nineteenth-century dishes -- a steak cut, a potato, a pudding -- and the name was often attached loosely, with little necessary connection to what the restaurant actually served. What is described here resembles the baked cream-and-crumb potato casserole familiar from twentieth-century home cooking, and it shows the older logic clearly: the dish is finished entirely on the stovetop first, and the oven does nothing but brown the top. The recipe also assumes something a modern cook has to arrange deliberately -- a bowl of cold boiled potatoes left from an earlier meal. Leftover boiled potatoes appear as a starting point in a number of potato recipes of the period.