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Potatoes with Parmesan
1 pound of potatoes 1/2 pint white sauce 2 ounces grated Parmesan 3 ounces bread crumbs 1/4 ounce butter Prepare the sauce according to recipe for white sauce. The potatoes must be boiled, but they must be firm. Cut them into slices a quarter of an inch thick, and put a layer at the bottom of a pie dish; cover these with a thin coating of the sauce. Repeat this until the potatoes and the sauce are all used. Now sprinkle the Parmesan over the sauce, and cover with bread crumbs. Break the butter in small bits, and place it over the top. Brown in a hot oven for about twenty minutes.
A plain potato gratin bound with white sauce. Everything depends on the potatoes being underdone when they go into the dish.
- Boil them firmThe potatoes finish cooking in the oven under the sauce, so stop boiling while a knife still meets resistance, well short of full tenderness; how long that takes depends entirely on the size of the potatoes. Fully cooked slices collapse into paste when layered and baked.
- Use a waxy potatoSlices a quarter-inch thick need to hold their shape. Yukon Gold, red or fingerling varieties slice cleanly; a floury baking potato will crumble at the edges.
- Half a pint of sauceThis is a British book, so half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Make it on the thin side of a standard béchamel — it has to coat slices rather than sit on them.
- Weights to volumesTwo ounces of Parmesan is roughly 2/3 cup finely grated. Three ounces of breadcrumbs is about 3/4 to 1 cup if dry, nearer 1 1/2 cups if fresh — either way a heavy lid; two ounces gives a better ratio of crust to potato.
- The butter is not a typoA quarter ounce is about 1 1/2 teaspoons, dotted over the crumbs. That is barely enough to brown three ounces of crumbs — either toss the crumbs in melted butter first or increase it to an ounce.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat browns the top and heats the interior through; the dish is not being cooked from raw.
- Pie dishA shallow ovenproof dish, not a pastry case. A 1-quart gratin dish takes this quantity in three or four layers.
- YieldOne pound of potatoes serves two as a main course with a salad, or four alongside something else.
Meatless cookbooks of the early twentieth century leaned hard on cheese, and Parmesan in particular, because it delivered concentrated savour in small quantities — two ounces here does the flavouring work that a bacon or ham layer would have done in a meat kitchen. The technique itself is the ordinary British household gratin: boiled potatoes, a flour-thickened white sauce, cheese and a crumb top browned quickly, a thriftier relative of the cream-baked potato dishes of southeastern France.