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Kentucky Potatoes
Pare and thinly slice 6 large potatoes; wash and soak them in cold water for half an hour.
Place in a baking dish, season with 1 teaspoonful of salt and 1/3 of a teaspoonful of white pepper. Pour over 1½ cupfuls of milk and bake in a hot oven until tender-about forty minutes.
When half done add 1/2 tablespoonful of butter.
A plain milk-baked scallop with no cheese, no flour and almost no fat — a Depression-era stretch of six potatoes into a supper dish. A few details in the wording are worth pinning down before you start.
- "Hot oven"In period usage this is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat uncovered milk will catch and brown at the edges; covering for the first 25 minutes, then uncovering, gives the same forty-minute finish with less scorching.
- The soak is the hingeHalf an hour in cold water pulls out surface starch so the slices stay separate rather than setting into a paste. Drain and dry them well — water carried into the dish thins the milk and it will not reduce in the time given.
- Slice thickness"Thinly" probably means something around 1/8 inch. Thicker slices may not be tender in forty minutes, and the milk can boil away before the centre softens. A mandoline is the easy route.
- Potato typeUse a starchy or all-purpose potato — russet or Maris Piper. Waxy salad potatoes will stay firm and the milk will not thicken, since the thickening comes largely from starch leaching out during baking.
- Milk will curdleWith no flour to stabilise it, whole milk at high heat often breaks into curds and whey. The dish still tastes right, but if you want it smooth, use half milk and half cream, or scald the milk before pouring it over.
- The butterHalf a tablespoon for six potatoes is notably thrifty. Adding it halfway, as directed, keeps it on the surface for browning. Two tablespoons dotted over the top is closer to modern expectations.
- White pepperOften chosen so no dark flecks show in a white dish. Its flavour differs from black — earthier and more fermented rather than fruity — and a third of a teaspoon is assertive, so taste if you substitute.
- YieldSix large potatoes and a pint-and-a-half dish serves four to six as a side, or three or four as the main event with bread.
Scalloped potatoes baked in milk are much older than this book — the technique of layering sliced roots with dairy and baking them runs through English and French cookery from at least the later eighteenth century. Its economy is the point: no cheese, no cream, no flour, no onion, and half a tablespoon of butter added late so it is tasted rather than absorbed. Regional names attached to potato dishes in American collections are often decorative rather than documentary, and there is no particular evidence that this method originated in Kentucky. What the recipe does record is the household arithmetic behind it — six potatoes, a cup and a half of milk, and a pinch of pepper feeding a family cheaply.