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Swiss Potatoes
Peel and cut the potatoes into inch and a half cubes or balls, using potatoes of a uniform size, and drop in hot oil until evenly browned. Then bake for half an hour in a slow oven.
Cover with a sauce made as follows:
Stir two tablespoons of butter and two tablespoons of flour, to a smooth paste, add slowly one cup of cream, stirring constantly. Let it come to the boiling point, and season with salt, paprika and chopped parsley.
A straightforward two-stage potato dish: fry, then bake, then sauce. The original assumes you know the quantities of potato and the state of the oil, so a few gaps need filling.
- QuantitiesNo yield is given. About 2 lb of potatoes (roughly six medium) fills a shallow baking dish and serves four; the cup of cream sauce is enough for that amount.
- Slow ovenAround 300-325F. Half an hour at that temperature finishes the interiors without darkening the fried crust further.
- Uniform size mattersThe instruction about potatoes of a uniform size is the hinge of the recipe. Cubes cut at 1 1/2 inches cook through in the oven at the same rate only if they genuinely match; ragged pieces give you some chalky centres and some collapsed ones.
- Frying oil"hot oil" suggests deep or at least generous fat; 350-365F is the usual working range. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp through the baking.
- BallsCutting potatoes into balls was done with a scoop very like a modern melon baller. It is decorative and wasteful; cubes cook identically.
- The sauceThis is a standard cream sauce built on a roux. Cook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before adding the cream, or the finished sauce tastes of raw flour. Add the cream in stages, off the heat if it wants to lump.
- Cream"cream" in cookbooks of this period often meant something nearer today's light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream will make the sauce very thick with two tablespoons of flour behind it; thin with milk to a pourable consistency.
- ServingSauce the potatoes at the table or immediately before serving. Left to stand under the sauce, the fried surfaces soften and the point of the frying is lost.
Meatless cookery books of the 1910s and 20s leaned heavily on potatoes, cheese and cream sauces to supply the richness a joint of meat would otherwise have carried, which may be why a potato dish sits in a chapter of meat substitutes rather than among the vegetables. The name looks like marketing rather than geography: "Swiss" appears in American cookbooks of the period on a range of dishes involving cream, cheese or a browned finish, much as "Spanish" often signalled tomato and pepper, though the usage was never consistent. There is no particular Swiss tradition of deep-fried cubed potatoes under a best-known potato dish, r"oesti, is a grated cake fried in fat and quite unrelated. The two-stage cooking is worth noting in itself: colour was developed in fat, where the cook could see it happening, and the slow oven was used only to finish the inside.