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Potatoes au Gratin
For breakfast potatoes au gratin are appetizing.
Boil 12 medium sized potatoes in the usual way till tender, with a little salt, drain and dry; then divide each potato in halves, lengthways. Brush over with plenty of melted butter, sprinkling liberally with grated Parmesan cheese. Lay them in a buttered tin and bake in a hot oven until a nice light brown color. Serve hot on a folded napkin.
A simpler dish than the name suggests: no cream, no sauce, just boiled potatoes split, buttered, cheesed and browned. A few points make the difference between crisp and soggy.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" of this sort is usually taken as roughly 425-450F. The potatoes are already cooked, so the heat is only there to brown the butter and cheese quickly before the interiors dry out.
- Dry them properlyThe instruction to drain and dry is the hinge of the recipe. Return the drained potatoes to the empty hot pan for a minute over low heat so the surface steam escapes; a wet cut face will steam rather than brown.
- Peeled or notThe original does not say whether the potatoes are peeled. Boiling in the skin and peeling while warm gives a firmer half that holds its shape when split.
- Potato typeA waxy or all-purpose potato holds together when halved; a very floury baking potato will collapse under the brushing.
- Buttered tinThis is a shallow baking tin or sheet pan, not a covered dish. Arrange the halves cut side up in a single layer with a little space between them so steam escapes.
- CheeseGrate the Parmesan fresh, and go easy on additional salt, since the potatoes were already salted in the boiling water.
- TimingExpect 15-20 minutes at 425F, or until the cheese has set into a light brown crust. Watch the last few minutes; Parmesan goes from golden to bitter quickly.
- Yield and serviceTwelve potatoes, halved, serve six to eight at breakfast. The folded napkin was a serving-dish liner meant to absorb steam and keep the crust from softening on the way to the table; a warmed platter works as well.
Au gratin means nothing more than browned on top, from the French gratter, to scrape, a derivation generally traced to the crusted bits scraped from the dish. The creamy, sauce-bound casserole that now dominates the English use of the term is a later narrowing; through the nineteenth century a gratin was simply anything finished under strong heat with cheese or crumbs to form a crust. Serving potatoes at breakfast was ordinary in American and British households of the day, and the folded napkin under the dish is a small survival of formal service.