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Stewed Potatoes
Mix two cups potato cubes with two tablespoons butter, two cups milk, salt and pepper.
Dredge with two tablespoons flour and cook twenty minutes in double boiler.
A creamed-potato dish of the plainest kind, written for cooks who kept boiled potatoes on hand. The double boiler is doing the work of a modern low burner, and it will not cook raw potato through.
- Use cooked potatoesTwenty minutes over simmering water will not soften raw potato cubes. Start with potatoes already boiled or steamed until just tender, cut in roughly half-inch dice; the recipe most likely assumes leftovers from a previous meal, though it does not say so.
- "Dredge with flour"Here it means sprinkle the flour over the surface and stir it in, not coat the potatoes before cooking. It thickens the milk into a light sauce as it heats.
- Avoiding lumpsFlour shaken dry onto hot milk tends to clump. Rub the two tablespoons of flour into the softened butter first and stir that paste in, or whisk the flour into a few tablespoons of the cold milk before adding.
- The double boilerIts purpose is to keep the milk from scorching or breaking. A heavy saucepan on the lowest heat works if you stir often, but the milk must never reach a rolling boil.
- SeasoningNo quantities are given. Start with about half a teaspoon of salt and a good grind of pepper for the two cups of potato, then taste at the end, since the sauce dulls salt considerably.
- ConsistencyTwo cups of milk to two tablespoons of flour gives a thin, pourable sauce. Expect something closer to a chowder than to scalloped potatoes; add another tablespoon of flour if you want it to coat.
- YieldServes three to four as a side dish. It reheats poorly once the potatoes break down, so make what you will eat.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its confectionery pages it runs to a full range of plain domestic cookery. This is that plain cookery at its plainest: cold boiled potatoes, milk, butter and flour, held over hot water while the cook attended to something else. The double boiler was near-universal equipment in American kitchens of the period, when coal and wood ranges gave uneven, hard-to-lower heat and milk sauces scorched easily on a direct flame. Recipes of this type appear under names such as stewed, creamed or scalloped potatoes with little consistency between books, and they are generally understood as a way of using up what the previous dinner left behind.