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Potato and Onion Pie No. 2
6 large potatoes 3 large onions 3 ounces butter Pepper and salt Peel, and wash the potatoes, and cut them into slices about the eighth of an inch thick; slice the onions very thin in rounds. Butter a pie-dish, and put a layer of potatoes at the bottom, then a few pieces of butter, then a layer of onion, pepper and salt, and so on, till the dish is full, leaving onions on top. Cover with plate, and cook slowly in the oven for three hours. Serve with grated cheese. A short crust may be put on this.
A plain layered potato-and-onion bake from a wartime-era meatless cookery book. The three-hour instruction is not a mistake, but it assumes a cooling range oven and no liquid at all.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no number; "cook slowly" in a range oven corresponds roughly to a low-to-moderate modern setting, somewhere around 300-325F. At that heat three hours is plausible for potatoes softening in their own moisture, and a hotter oven will shorten it.
- The covered plateThe inverted plate is the hinge of the recipe. There is no stock or milk, so the potatoes steam in the liquid the onions release. An uncovered dish, or a loose foil tent, will give you dry, leathery slices. Seal it well and only uncover for the last 20 minutes if you want colour on top.
- Slice thicknessAn eighth of an inch is about 3 mm, easiest on a mandoline. Thicker slices will not cook through in a dish with no added liquid.
- Butter quantityThree ounces is about 6 tablespoons, or 85 g. Dot it between layers rather than melting it in; the point is that it renders down through the stack as it cooks.
- Pie-dish sizeSix large potatoes and three onions fill a dish of about 2 to 2.5 quarts. Pack the layers down firmly, as the stack will settle considerably.
- The short crustThe recipe only notes that a short crust may be added, without saying when. In a modern oven it is worth laying the pastry on for the last half-hour or so at a higher heat; a crust left through three slow hours under a plate is likely to be pale and sodden.
- Cheese"Serve with grated cheese" suggests the cheese goes over the finished dish rather than being baked into the layers. A dry, sharp cheese does the most work here, since the dish itself is seasoned only with salt and pepper.
- YieldServes four as a main course with the cheese, or six as a side.
Meatless cookery books of the early twentieth century leaned heavily on potatoes and onions, both of them cheap and storable, and because the combination of starch, fat and allium gives a savoury depth that reads as substantial without meat. The technique -- sliced potatoes layered with fat and baked slowly under a cover -- is old and widespread across northern Europe, surfacing as the French gratin family and as the British potato pie, and the "No. 2" in the title suggests the book carried more than one version of the dish.