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Scalloped Dasheen
4 medium-sized dasheen 1 cup milk 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon cracker crumbs 1 teaspoon salt Wash and scrub the dasheen, boil, and slice. Butter a baking dish, and put in a layer of sliced dasheen, sprinkle with salt and flour, and dot with butter. Add another layer of dasheen and the other ingredients, finishing with the flour and butter on top. Pour on the milk, and sprinkle cracker crumbs or toasted bread crumbs on the top, and bake in a moderate oven about one-half hour. The quantity of milk and butter will vary according to the size of the dasheen.
A plain milk-and-butter scallop built on taro rather than potato. It works, but the root needs handling that the original takes for granted.
- Dasheen is taroSold today as taro or eddo in Caribbean, West African and East Asian groceries; malanga is a related but distinct root often shelved alongside it. Four medium corms might come to something like 2 to 2 1/2 lb, though what counts as medium varies a good deal.
- Never taste it rawRaw taro is loaded with calcium oxalate crystals that sting the mouth and throat. Full boiling until a knife slides through easily is what makes it edible, so do not shortcut the initial cooking or try to bake it from raw.
- Peel with careThe sap irritates many people's hands. Boil the corms whole in their skins as directed, then slip the peel off once they are cool enough to handle, or wear gloves if peeling first.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Half an hour is enough to set the milk into a light sauce and brown the crumbs, since everything in the dish is already cooked.
- The flour has to be spread thinA tablespoon of dry flour dusted over layers is all that thickens the milk. Sprinkle it evenly rather than dropping it in patches, or you will get pale lumps in the finished sauce.
- Milk to the top layerThe note about quantity varying is real. Pour in enough milk to come just to the top layer of slices without submerging the crumbs, usually a cup for a small dish and more for a wider one.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs mean crushed soda or water crackers. Unsalted or lightly salted crumbs are closer to the original than seasoned commercial breadcrumbs; toss them with a little melted butter if you want reliable browning.
- TextureTaro is drier and more mealy than potato and drinks up liquid as it bakes. Expect something closer to a firm gratin than a creamy one, and let it stand five minutes before serving.
- YieldServes roughly four to six as a side dish.
Dasheen appears in meatless cookery of this period because the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent the 1910s actively promoting it as a starch crop for the South, distributing corms and issuing bulletins comparing it favorably with the potato; the name is West Indian, and is generally traced to the French de Chine, "from China," though taro itself was carried across the tropics long before either language reached it. Wartime and pre-war food conservation campaigns leaned on any homegrown starch that could stretch a meal without meat, and a scallop like this one is the standard American treatment applied to an unfamiliar root: layer it, dust it with flour, cover it in milk, crumb the top.