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Potatoes in Cream No. 1
Prepare the potatoes for boiling, then cut in half-inch cubes. Soak in cold water half an hour, then cook in boiling, salted water until soft. Drain thoroughly. Make a sauce of 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 tablespoon of flour, finely chopped onion, 1 cup of milk, salt and pepper. Reheat the potatoes in the sauce.
A plain white-sauce potato dish written in the shorthand of a period when cooks were assumed to know sauce ratios by heart. The only real decision is how much potato the sauce will coat.
- Missing quantityNo amount of potato is given. One tablespoon each of butter and flour with a cup of milk makes about a cup of thin white sauce, which will lightly coat something in the region of a pound to a pound and a half of potatoes, or about four servings. More potato than that and the dish goes dry.
- The soakHalf an hour in cold water pulls surface starch off the cut cubes, so they boil cleaner and are less likely to cloud the water or break down at the edges. Worth doing if you want distinct cubes in the finished dish.
- Cook them short of softSince the cubes then sit in hot sauce, it is worth pulling them when a knife meets slight resistance, about 8-10 minutes at a bare simmer; a hard rolling boil knocks the corners off.
- Drain thoroughly means dryReturn the drained cubes to the hot empty pan for a minute so the surface water steams off. Wet potatoes thin the sauce.
- The onion needs cooking firstThe original drops chopped onion into the sauce with no instruction. Sweat a tablespoon or two of finely chopped onion in the butter until translucent before adding the flour, otherwise it stays raw and sharp in a sauce that only simmers a few minutes.
- Sauce methodCook the butter and flour together a full minute before the milk goes in, add the milk gradually off the boil, and simmer two or three minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Season after it has thickened.
- Reheating, not boilingFold the potatoes in and warm them through over low heat. Boiling the assembled dish breaks the cubes and the sauce turns pasty as the potato starch leaches out.
Potatoes in cream sauce turn up in nearly every American general cookbook of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sometimes as a way of using yesterday's boiled potatoes, though many versions, this one among them, start from raw. The sauce itself is the standard thin white sauce that domestic-science teaching of the era drilled as a memorized ratio - one tablespoon each of fat and flour to a cup of milk - which is why the recipe can name the sauce without explaining it and still expect to be understood.