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Potatoes with Cream Sauce
Prepare the potatoes as directed for stewed potatoes. After they are drained turn into a heated dish, pour over the Cream Sauce, sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve. ½ pint of milk, POTATOES au GRATIN.
Yolks of four eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, 6 boiled potatoes, 1 tablespoonful of flour, ½ pint of stock, 4 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese, Salt and cayenne to taste.
Cut the potatoes into slices and put them into a bakingdish. Put the butter in a saucepan to melt, add the flour, mix, add the stock and cream, stir continually until they boil; take from the fire, add the cheese, the yolks, well beaten, salt and cayenne. Pour this over the potatoes, sprinkle bread crumbs over the top, put in a quick oven ten minutes to brown. Serve in the dish in which they were baked with duck, roasted wild turkey, mutton or game.
Two recipes have run together here: a one-line finish for stewed potatoes in cream sauce, then a full potatoes au gratin whose ingredient list has been scrambled in the setting. Read the au gratin method carefully before shopping.
- The stray milk lineA "½ pint of milk" sits just before the au gratin heading; it belongs to the cream sauce of the preceding recipe. The au gratin list calls for ½ pint of stock, while the method says to add "the stock and cream," and no cream quantity is given anywhere. Half a pint of stock with half a pint of cream or milk makes about the right amount of sauce for 6 potatoes.
- Sauce to potato ratioThree cups of sauce over six sliced boiled potatoes is generous by modern habit and will pool. A cup and a half to two cups coats the slices without swamping them; hold the rest back or thicken with a second spoonful of flour.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. Ten minutes at that heat browns the crumbs on a dish that is already hot; if the sauce and potatoes have cooled, the dish needs twenty to thirty minutes at 400F to heat through before it will brown properly.
- The hinge: the yolksFour yolks go in off the heat, after the sauce has boiled. Beat them well, slacken them with a ladle of the hot sauce, then return the mixture to the pan. Yolks stirred straight into a boiling roux scramble, and the sauce cannot be brought back.
- CayenneHere it is likely meant as a background warmth rather than pronounced heat. A pinch or two is enough; the cheese and the yolks are the flavour.
- CheeseFour tablespoons of grated cheese is a modest amount, roughly an ounce. A dry aged cheese gives more return than a mild one at that quantity.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh, and tossed with a little melted butter if you want reliable colour in ten minutes. Unbuttered crumbs under a quick oven tend to scorch at the edges and stay pale in the middle.
- YieldSix potatoes serves four to six as a side dish, which matches the roast duck, wild turkey, mutton or game it is offered alongside.
Gratin in French kitchen usage means the browned crust itself — the word is related to grating or scraping, the crisped part scraped from the dish — and only later came to name the dish beneath it. What makes this version notable is the sauce: not simple cream, but a stock-based velouté enriched with four egg yolks and only a token amount of cheese, closer to the sauces of the professional dining room than to the cheese-heavy gratins that became standard in home cooking later. The serving note is telling too. Potatoes here are not the everyday starch but a rich accompaniment aimed squarely at roast game, and a dish built on stock rather than milk was meant to stand up to it.