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Panned Potatoes
Chop fine two uncooked potatoes, put them in a shallow baking-dish. Add two ounces of butter, a half teaspoonful of salt, and a dash of pepper. Cover with crumbs and bake them in a moderate oven three-quarters of an hour.
A small gratin of raw potato baked in butter and crumbs. The whole thing hinges on how finely the potato is cut, since there is no liquid to help it cook.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" here means roughly 350–375F. At that heat three-quarters of an hour is realistic only if the potato is genuinely chopped fine — roughly 1/4-inch dice or thinner slices. Larger pieces will still be firm at the hour mark.
- Butter quantityTwo ounces is half a stick, or 4 tablespoons, for about two medium potatoes. That is generous by design: the butter is the cooking medium, so cut it into bits and scatter it through the potato rather than laying it on top.
- CrumbsPeriod "crumbs" usually means breadcrumbs from stale bread, finer and denser than panko, though soft fresh crumbs also appear in recipes of the era. Toss them with a little of the butter before covering, or they scorch before the potato underneath is tender.
- CoveringThe recipe says to cover with crumbs, not with a lid, but a piece of foil or a plate over the dish for the first 25 minutes traps steam and guarantees the potato cooks through; uncover to brown the top.
- Dish sizeUse a shallow dish that holds the potato no more than an inch deep. Piled higher, the centre steams into a wet mass while the surface dries out.
- DiscolourationRaw chopped potato greys quickly. Cut it directly into the buttered dish and get it into the oven at once rather than letting it sit in water, which would rinse away surface starch.
- YieldTwo potatoes serves two as a side dish. The recipe scales straightforwardly, but keep the depth constant and widen the dish instead.
"Panned" in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant baked in a shallow pan with butter — the same sense preserved in "panned oysters." It was a way of getting the effect of frying without standing over a skillet. Cookery writers of the period were also making a case for potatoes cooked without boiling: boiling was blamed for leaching away what were then loosely called the potato's salts, and dry-heat methods like this one were promoted as saving them. The dish is essentially a plain ancestor of the modern potato gratin, minus the cream, and its brevity is typical of the era, which assumed the reader already knew what a browned crumb top should look like.