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Minced Potatoes
3 medium sized potatoes 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup cream Peel the potatoes, and cook in boiling, salted water to cover. When beginning to get tender, add a cup of cold water, and bring again to the boiling point. When tender, drain, and cool. Cut into three-fourth inch cubes or slices. Put into a buttered pan and place in the oven. When thoroughly heated and beginning to brown, pour over them the cream, and stir. Allow the potatoes to brown again, and stir once more. When browned again on top, serve. One-half cup of milk--scant--and one tablespoon butter may be substituted for the cream if desired.
A plain creamed-and-browned potato dish from the era when "minced" meant cut small rather than ground. Nothing here is difficult, but the method depends on undercooking the potatoes slightly so the cubes hold their shape through two rounds of browning.
- The hinge: don't overcook the potatoesThey are boiled only until tender, cooled, then cubed and baked twice. Potatoes cooked to the falling-apart stage will collapse into mash the first time you stir in the cream. Stop when a knife slides in with slight resistance.
- The cup of cold waterAdding cold water mid-boil checks the pot and brings the cooking back down before it is finished; the recipe gives no reason for it. It does no harm, but is largely unnecessary with modern even-sized potatoes; simply keep the boil gentle.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Use 400-425F: hot enough to brown the cut faces, not so hot that the cream scorches before the second stir.
- "Minced"Whatever the usual sense of the word, here it plainly covers pieces larger than a fine chop: the recipe itself specifies three-quarter-inch cubes or slices.
- CreamHousehold cream of the period was generally thinner than modern heavy cream, nearer to what we would call light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream works but will read as richer than the author is likely to have had in mind.
- Potato varietyA waxy or all-purpose potato (Yukon Gold, red) holds cube shape far better than a floury baking potato, which will slump into the cream.
- SaltThe teaspoon of salt goes in the cooking water, not into the finished dish. Season again after the cream goes in and taste before the final browning.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Three medium potatoes will serve two or three as a side.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American cookbooks published around the time of the First World War, when meat conservation was both a patriotic campaign and, for a growing number of households influenced by vegetarian and health-reform movements, a settled conviction. The technique itself is older than the book and thoroughly domestic — parboiled potatoes finished in a hot buttered pan with dairy poured over turn up under various names in nineteenth-century household manuals, and the double stirring here is simply a way of building crust on more than one surface without a broiler.