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Potatoes and Cheese
1 pound mashed potatoes cold 1 ounce butter 3 ounces grated cheese 1/4 pint milk Mash the potatoes, and add the cheese and pepper. Put the milk and butter into a small saucepan, and bring to a boil, and pour over the potatoes and cheese. Beat well for five minutes, put into a buttered pie-dish, and bake in a quick oven for fifteen minutes; or, put into scallop-shells, and sprinkle with rusk crumbs, and bake for a few minutes.
A wartime supper dish that depends entirely on the potatoes being well seasoned before they go into the dish. Everything else is a matter of getting the milk hot enough to loosen the cold mash.
- Quick ovenSet the oven to 425-450F. Nothing here needs cooking through; the heat is only there to brown the top and set the surface in fifteen minutes.
- The quarter pintIf the book is British, a quarter pint is 5 fluid ounces, a scant 2/3 cup. If American, it is a level 1/2 cup. Either works, but start with the smaller amount and add more only if the mash stays stiff.
- A pound of mashed potatoesRoughly 2 cups of mash, from about 1 1/2 lb of raw floury potatoes.
- SaltOnly pepper is listed, on the assumption that yesterday's mashed potatoes were already salted. If yours were not, salt them now, and taste before the dish goes into the oven.
- Beat well for five minutesFive minutes here means beating by hand. A food processor will work the starch gluey very quickly; a spoon or a sturdy whisk is the safer tool.
- Grated cheeseA firm dry Cheddar or similar hard cheese, grated fine. Three ounces is about 3/4 cup packed; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and will not melt as smoothly.
- Rusk crumbsCrumbs from dried rusk or zwieback, drier and blander than fresh breadcrumbs and therefore quicker to brown. Plain dried breadcrumbs or panko stand in; toss them with a little melted butter so they colour rather than scorch.
- Scallop-shellsIndividual shells or small ramekins, filled shallow. They need less time than the pie-dish, so watch for the crumbs to colour rather than trusting the clock.
- YieldEnough for two as a main course with a salad, or four as a side dish.
Potatoes and cheese was an obvious candidate for a meat substitute: both were comparatively plentiful and cheap, and the combination gave a dish that felt substantial without any butcher's meat. The details give away its origins in a thrifty kitchen rather than a grand one s- cold leftover mash, a pie-dish, rusk crumbs from the biscuit tin. The scallop-shell variation is the older presentation trick of serving small savoury portions in real shells, which is where the word scallop in the sense of a baked, crumbed dish is traditionally said to come from.