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Sliced Potatoes in Cream
4 medium sized potatoes 2/3 cup milk 1/3 cup cream 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Peel and boil the potatoes as for minced potatoes. Add the salt, milk and cream, and bake in the oven. Allow them to cook slowly for one-half hour or more until the liquid becomes quite thick.
A scalloped potato without the flour, the cheese or the crumb topping: the sauce thickens on nothing but the starch the potatoes give up. That is the whole mechanism, and it dictates most of the choices below.
- "As for minced potatoes"The cross-referenced recipe is not reproduced here, but the instruction to peel and boil suggests the potatoes are boiled whole until barely tender, then cooled enough to handle and sliced. Stop the boiling while the centres still resist a knife tip; fully soft potatoes collapse into mash during the half hour in the oven.
- Slice thicknessAbout 1/4 inch is a reasonable target. Much thicker and the slices are slower to give up starch within the half hour the recipe allows; paper-thin slices tend to disintegrate.
- Do not rinse the slicesThe surface starch is the thickener here. Rinsing or soaking sliced potatoes, standard advice for crisp fries, will leave you with potatoes sitting in thin milk.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, only "cook slowly." In modern terms a low oven, somewhere around 300-325F, suits the instruction; higher and the milk is liable to scorch at the edges of the dish before the middle has thickened.
- DairyThe 2/3 cup milk plus 1/3 cup cream is roughly a cup of half-and-half, which can be substituted directly. Some fat is needed; all skim milk is prone to separating into curds and whey at oven heat.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half for four potatoes is heavy by current taste, particularly since none is lost to boiling water at this stage. Start with a scant teaspoon and correct at the table.
- Dish and coverageUse a shallow baking dish, about 1 to 1 1/2 quarts, so the small amount of liquid comes well up around the slices rather than pooling under them. In a deep dish the potatoes swim and never thicken; baking uncovered lets evaporation do part of the work.
- YieldFour medium potatoes serve three to four as a side dish, or two as the centre of a meal.
Cookbooks titled Meatless Cookery multiplied in the English-speaking world around the First World War, when wheat, meat and fat were the targets of official conservation campaigns and "meatless days" were promoted as patriotic rather than dietary. Sliced potatoes in cream fit that logic: the dish is not pretending to be meat, it is occupying meat's place on the plate, and the cream supplies the richness the absent roast would have brought. The technique itself is older than the campaign, and the same idea underlies the French gratin dauphinois, which likewise depends on potato starch rather than a flour-thickened sauce. What is striking about this version is the plainness, no garlic, no cheese, no crumbs, and the assumption that the cook already knows the earlier recipe for minced potatoes.