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Delmonico Hashed Potatoes
Pare uncooked potatoes; cut them into very small dice; throw them into cold water and soak for thirty minutes. Drain, put them in a baking dish, cover with milk, dust with salt and pepper, add a little butter cut in bits, and bake in a moderate oven for forty-five minutes.
A potato gratin in all but name, built on raw diced potato and milk rather than the leftover boiled potatoes that "hashed" usually implies. Two details decide whether it works.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. At much more the milk skins and scorches before the dice are tender; at much less the starch never sets.
- The soak is not optionalThirty minutes in cold water pulls surface starch off the dice so they cook clean rather than gluing into a mass. Drain them well and pat dry, or the extra water thins the milk.
- Dice size"Very small dice" probably means something around a quarter inch. Larger cubes may still be firm at forty-five minutes; keep them even so they cook at the same rate.
- Milk quantityThe recipe gives none. Enough to just cover the potatoes in the dish, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups for 2 lb of potatoes in a shallow 8-by-8 dish. Whole milk holds together better than skim, which is prone to breaking.
- Potato varietyA starchy baking potato will partly dissolve and thicken the milk into a sauce, which is pleasant; a waxy potato keeps its edges and stays looser. Either works, but expect different results.
- Baking dishShallow and wide beats deep. A depth of more than about an inch and a half of potato leaves the middle undercooked at the stated time.
- Doneness and browningTest with a knife tip at forty-five minutes; the milk should be mostly absorbed and thickened. If the top is pale, a few minutes under the broiler will brown it, though the recipe itself calls for no browned surface.
- YieldAbout four side servings from 2 lb of potatoes. It is a cheap dish by design and reheats well, though the texture tightens.
The Delmonico name attached itself to a great many dishes in American cookbooks between roughly 1880 and 1920, often with no connection to the New York restaurant beyond borrowed prestige — it functioned much as "deluxe" or "supreme" would later. This version is a good example: milk, butter, salt and pepper over raw potato is about as plain as cooking gets, and the label is doing the work of making it sound like a treat. Potatoes were cheap and filling, and a dish that turned them into something that could be sent to the table in its baking dish, with no meat and only a little butter, was an economical way to feed a household. Cooking the potatoes raw in milk rather than boiling them first also saved a pot, a burner and the nutrients that go down the drain with the cooking water — an economy that period domestic-science writers argued for repeatedly.