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Creamed Potatoes
Cut two cups cold boiled potatoes in very thin slices, or in cubes. Add one cup white sauce. Season highly and reheat in double boiler. Serve in hot dish sprinkled with finely chopped parsley.
A leftover-potato dish that assumes you already have a pan of white sauce on hand. Two points decide whether it comes out well: the potatoes must be cold and firm before slicing, and the sauce must be assertively seasoned.
- The white sauceA standard medium white sauce of this period runs about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it thickens and loses its raw-flour taste; the book's own white sauce recipe is the one to follow. One cup of sauce to two cups of potato gives a coated, not soupy, result.
- Cold potatoes are not a shortcutPotatoes boiled the day before and thoroughly chilled slice cleanly and hold their shape when reheated. Warm ones crumble into the sauce and turn it to paste.
- "Season highly"Potato and milk are both flat, so the seasoning has to carry the dish. Salt generously, add white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate. Taste the sauce before it meets the potatoes, when you can still correct it.
- Double boilerThe point is to reheat without scorching the milk or breaking up the slices. A heavy saucepan over low heat with frequent gentle stirring will do the same job; do not let it boil.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of potato with a cup of sauce comes to roughly three side-dish servings, or two if it is standing in for a main course with eggs or ham.
- ServingThe hot dish matters more than it sounds: on a cool platter the sauce cools and skins over quickly. The recipe sprinkles the parsley over the finished dish rather than stirring it into the pan.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and while it is a general household cookbook it gives generous space to chocolate work; the vegetable chapter is plain domestic-science cooking of the sort taught in the Boston school tradition. Creamed dishes are often said to have been a mainstay of that tradition, since a single well-made white sauce could be redirected onto potatoes, onions, celery, cod or hard-boiled eggs, and it gave cold leftovers a second respectable appearance at table. The instruction to reheat in a double boiler reflects a kitchen where heat was hard to regulate: on a coal or wood range, a pan of milk sauce set directly over the firebox would catch long before it was hot through.