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Savory Potatoes No. 2
3 medium sized potatoes 1/2 small onion 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup water 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Peel and slice the onion in the bottom of a buttered pan. Then slice the potatoes. There should be one pint of sliced potatoes. Sprinkle with salt, and pour over the hot water. Bake in a slow oven two hours or more.
A plain scalloped potato with no milk or cheese — the liquid is water, and the two-hour slow bake is what turns it into something worth eating. Read the timing as deliberate, not as an error.
- Slow ovenTake "slow" as 300–325°F. At that heat the water reduces gradually and the potato starch thickens what is left; a hotter oven boils the liquid away before the slices soften.
- A pint of sliced potatoesThe recipe measures the potatoes by volume rather than weight, so ignore "3 medium" if your potatoes are large. A pint of slices is roughly 10 oz of peeled potato, enough for a small 1-quart baking dish.
- Slice thicknessNo thickness is given. About 1/8 inch is right — thick enough to hold shape over two hours, thin enough that the slices bond into layers.
- Salt1 1/2 teaspoons for about 10 oz of potato and a cup of water is assertive by modern taste. Start with a teaspoon and correct at the table.
- ButterOne tablespoon is used only to grease the pan, which is why the dish reads so lean. Dotting a little more over the top before baking is within the spirit of the recipe and helps the surface brown.
- Cover or notThe original says nothing about covering, and baked uncovered it gives a browned, slightly crusted top and a nearly dry finish. Covering for the first hour and uncovering for the second gives more evenly cooked slices if your oven runs dry.
- YieldServes two as a side dish.
Recipes of this kind appear in the meatless and economy cookery books that were common in English-speaking countries in the early twentieth century, associated with vegetarian and health-reform movements and with periods of food economy when households were urged to observe meatless days. The technique is scalloped potatoes stripped to its bones — the cream, cheese and flour that usually bind such a dish are absent, and the long slow bake is doing the thickening, drawing starch out of the slices into the small amount of water.