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Potatoes Au Gratin
4 medium sized potatoes 1 cup bread crumbs 1/4 pound Neufchatel cheese 4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk 2 tablespoons toasted bread crumbs 1/2 teaspoon salt Boil the potatoes, chop, and spread in the bottom of a pan. Cover with the grated cheese and a layer of the bread crumbs, then pour over all the white sauce, made as follows: Rub together the flour and butter, add a little hot milk, then the remainder of the hot milk, and salt. Cook twenty minutes in a double boiler. When pouring the white sauce over the bread crumbs and potato, see that it permeates thoroughly. Sprinkle the toasted crumbs over the top, and bake in a quick oven.
A plain scalloped-potato gratin from a wartime meat-saving book. Two things need attention before you start: the cheese, which is not what a modern label means by Neufchatel, and the twenty-minute sauce.
- The cheese is the sticking pointAmerican Neufchatel of this period was a fresh, soft, spreadable cheese, far softer than a grating cheese, and although the recipe says "grated" it will crumble rather than shred. Today's tub-style Neufchatel is a lower-fat cream cheese and behaves much the same way. For a gratin that browns, use 4 oz of a firm cheese that melts — Gruyère, aged cheddar or a mix — or crumble the soft cheese over the potatoes in small pieces and accept a creamier, paler result.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400–450F, at the hotter end of period usage. The dish goes in fully cooked, so the oven is only setting the top: about 20 to 25 minutes, until the crumbs are brown and the sauce bubbles at the edge.
- The white sauceTwenty minutes in a double boiler is the old insurance against a raw-flour taste and scorched milk. In a heavy saucepan over medium heat the same sauce is done in 5 to 8 minutes of steady whisking once it thickens. Four tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of milk gives a medium-thick binding sauce, which is what you want here — it has to coat potatoes and crumbs without going watery.
- Rub together, then thin graduallyThis is a kneaded-butter method rather than a cooked roux. Work the flour into the softened butter, then add hot milk a little at a time, whisking smooth before each addition, or you will get lumps that twenty minutes of gentle cooking will not fix.
- Chop, do not mashBoil the potatoes whole in their skins, peel while warm, and cut into rough half-inch pieces. Slices work as well. Anything finer collapses into a paste under the sauce.
- Season more than the half teaspoonHalf a teaspoon of salt for two cups of milk plus four potatoes is light by current taste. Salt the potato water, and taste the finished sauce. A grating of nutmeg or a little dry mustard suits the cheese.
- Crumbs"Toasted bread crumbs" means dry crumbs browned in a pan or oven, coarser than commercial fine crumbs. Tossing them with a teaspoon of melted butter keeps them from scorching at that heat.
- YieldFour as a main course, or six as a side, in a buttered 8-inch square or shallow 1 1/2-quart dish. Let it stand five minutes before serving so the sauce sets enough to spoon.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a small flood of books published around the First World War; the American meatless-day conservation drive dates specifically to 1917, though books of this title appear both before and during American belligerency, and any link between this one's contents and the 1917 drive is unproven.