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Scalloped Potatoes
Mix two cups potato cubes with two cups white sauce, cover with buttered bread crumbs, and bake thirty minutes in hot oven. A few drops onion juice may be added.
A terse turn-of-the-century formula that assumes you already know how to make white sauce and already have cooked potatoes on hand. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The potatoes must be cooked firstThirty minutes in a hot oven will not cook raw potato through when it is insulated by sauce. Boil or steam peeled potatoes until just tender, cool, and cut into half-inch cubes; two cups is roughly three-quarters of a pound of potatoes before peeling.
- What "white sauce" means hereA medium béchamel: 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and white pepper. Books of this period print it as a separate base recipe, which is why none of it appears above.
- Hot oven400-425F. At that heat the crumbs brown in about the same time the sauce comes up to a bubble at the edges.
- Buttered bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread tossed with melted butter, about 1 cup crumbs to 2 tablespoons butter. Dry commercial crumbs tend to brown faster and may colour before the interior is hot through.
- Onion juiceMade by grating a halved onion on a fine grater and using the liquid that collects. A teaspoon of grated onion or a pinch of onion powder does the same work.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart baking dish, buttered, since the potatoes and sauce together come to about a quart. Serves four as a side. Let it stand five minutes out of the oven so the sauce sets enough to spoon.
Scalloped dishes are usually explained by way of "escalloped" — food cut small, sauced, crumbed and baked — though the word's ultimate origin is unsettled: the scallop shell in which such dishes were once cooked and served is one line of descent, the "collop" or slice of meat another, and the connection between them is traditional rather than established. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared, the technique had been reduced to a standard American formula: cubed or sliced cooked vegetable, white sauce, buttered crumbs, hot oven. The extreme brevity here is characteristic of the book, which was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume built around its chocolate and cocoa, with the savory chapters written for cooks presumed to have already mastered a small set of foundation sauces. White sauce was the great workhorse of that training — Boston Cooking School teaching in particular treated it as a base to be learned once and applied to everything from oysters to celery — so a recipe could invoke "two cups white sauce" and consider the matter settled. The optional onion juice reflects a period preference for the flavor of onion without the texture of it.