Home › Vegetables › Scalloped Potatoes
Scalloped Potatoes
Cut cold, boiled potatoes in dice. To every quart of dice allow two tablespoonfuls of butter, two even tablespoonfuls of flour, one pint of milk, one teaspoonful of salt, a quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper.
Put the butter in a saucepan to melt, add the flour, mix until smooth, add the milk, stirring constantly until it boils. Add the salt and pepper and mix the whole carefully with the potatoes. Turn them into a baking-dish, cover the top thickly with stale bread crumbs, put a few bits of butter here and there and bake in a quick oven until a golden brown. Serve in the dish in which they are cooked.
A white-sauce scallop built from potatoes already cooked, which makes it a leftovers dish rather than a long bake. Everything is hot when it goes into the oven, so the baking is only for browning.
- Quick ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F, though the recipe gives no temperature. The sauce goes on hot but the potatoes are cold, so bake until the crumbs take colour, as the recipe directs, rather than to a fixed time.
- A quart of diceAbout 4 cups, which is roughly 1.5 lb of boiled potatoes. Cut them in half-inch dice; smaller pieces break down into the sauce and the dish turns to mash.
- Pint of milkTwo cups. The butter-and-flour proportion given (2 tablespoons each to a pint) makes a thin pouring sauce by design, not a thick one; it tightens in the oven.
- Cook the flourLet the butter and flour bubble together for a minute before the milk goes in, and add the milk gradually while whisking. The recipe's "stirring constantly until it boils" is the whole technique.
- Stale bread crumbsDry crumbs from day-old bread, not the fine dried commercial kind and not panko. Tossing them in a little melted butter first browns them more evenly than the scattered bits the recipe calls for.
- Cold potatoes matterPotatoes boiled the day before and thoroughly chilled hold their shape when folded into the sauce. Freshly boiled hot ones crumble.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. Use a shallow two-quart baking dish; depth slows browning and is the enemy of this recipe.
This belongs to the late nineteenth-century American cooking-school tradition, where a plain white sauce was taught as a foundation and then applied across dozens of dishes — creamed onions, scalloped oysters, scalloped potatoes. The word scallop here descends from the older escallop, generally traced to food cooked in a shell or shallow dish with crumbs — so it is not unconnected to the shellfish — and by this period it simply meant anything sauced and crumb-topped in a bake. Note that the potatoes are already boiled: this is a recipe for using up yesterday's pot.