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Country Potatoes
Put 2 cups diced raw potatoes in frying pan with 1/2 teaspoon salt, pepper and 2 tablespoons butter or margarine. Sprinkle with 2 tablespoons flour and mix. Pour 1 cup milk over the mixture, cook slowly till potatoes are creamy. Serve with minced parsley over top.
A simple stovetop creamed potato that cooks the starch and the sauce in one pan. It works, but only if the dice is small and the heat stays low.
- Dice size is the hingeRaw potatoes need to cook through in the milk, so cut them no larger than 1/2 inch. Larger cubes will leave the sauce reduced and scorched before the centres are tender.
- Keep the heat genuinely lowMilk with flour in it will catch on the pan bottom the moment it stops moving. Use a heavy skillet over low heat, cover it, and stir every few minutes; expect 20 to 25 minutes.
- Potato varietyA waxy or all-purpose potato (Yukon Gold, red-skinned) holds its shape. Russets will break down into something closer to mashed potato in gravy, which is edible but not what is described.
- MilkWhole milk is almost certainly what is meant here. Skim will taste thin and is likelier to break; if you want it richer, replace 1/4 cup of the milk with cream.
- Thinning as it goesOne cup of milk to two cups of potato is a tight ratio once the flour swells. Keep a little extra milk warm and add it by the tablespoon if the pan goes dry before the potatoes are soft.
- Cook out the flourSprinkle the flour onto the buttered potatoes and let it cook a minute before the milk goes in, or the sauce will carry a raw, pasty taste.
- YieldTwo cups of diced potato serves two generously or three as a side dish alongside a roast.
Creamed potatoes in one form or another run through American home cookery from the nineteenth century onward, and this version most likely belongs to the thrifty middle of the twentieth: butter or margarine offered as equals, a tablespoon or two of flour standing in for cream, and a single skillet doing the work of a saucepan and a baking dish. The name "country" here probably signals plainness rather than any particular region, much as "country style" was attached to gravies, sausage and fried steak in the same decades. A dish this humble would have sat comfortably beside a roast, dressed up with nothing more than a scatter of minced parsley, a common finishing touch in cookery of the period.