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Potatoes (Pint raw potatoes Butter Salt)
1 pint raw potatoes Butter Salt and pepper 1/2 small onion 1/2 cup bread crumbs 1 cup milk Peel and slice the potatoes; put them in the kettle in layers, covering each with salt, pepper, butter and a little onion. Put a layer of bread crumbs on top; pour on the milk; heat thoroughly and place in the cooker. Use two radiators and bake two and a half hours.
This is scalloped potatoes written for a fireless cooker — an insulated box in which food is brought to temperature on the stove, then sealed in with preheated stone or metal discs to finish on stored heat. Everything about the method assumes equipment almost nobody now owns.
- What a radiator isThe "radiators" are soapstone or metal discs heated on the range until very hot, then set inside the insulated box with the kettle. Two radiators generally meant one below and one above, the arrangement used for dishes described as baked rather than stewed.
- Oven equivalentWith two radiators the cooker worked as a warm, steadily cooling box rather than a maintained oven. A rough modern substitute is a covered dish in a moderate oven until the potatoes are tender, uncovered at the end to colour the crumbs; treat any temperature and time as an approximation, not a conversion from the original.
- A pint of potatoesPotatoes were measured by volume once sliced. A pint of raw slices is about 3/4 lb, or two medium potatoes — a small dish serving two, three at most alongside something else.
- Heat thoroughly is the hingeThe instruction to heat thoroughly before the kettle goes into the cooker is the whole method, not a nicety. Retained-heat cooking adds no energy; if the milk and potatoes go in lukewarm they will sit warm for hours and sour rather than cook. Bring the milk to a full simmer around the potatoes first.
- Milk and scorchingWhole milk with no flour or roux will curdle if it catches on the bottom. Modern practice is to slip a thin layer of butter or a spoonful of flour dusted between the potato layers, which thickens the milk into a sauce and keeps it smooth.
- Bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs from stale bread, not the sandy commercial kind. Toss them with a little melted butter before they go on or they will absorb milk and stay pale.
- Seasoning the layersSalting each layer rather than the milk matters here, since potato slices season poorly from the outside. Half a small onion, sliced paper-thin, is enough for this quantity.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between about 1900 and the 1920s, promoted as fuel economy at a time when a coal or wood range had to be stoked all afternoon to bake anything. The cooker was a lidded, heavily insulated chest — sawdust, hay, ground cork or mineral wool packed around a metal well — and the cook heated soapstone discs on the range, dropped them in with the pot, and shut the lid on breakfast before leaving the house. Loose-leaf cookbooks of the period, which were sold as expandable binders so a housekeeper could add her own cards, sometimes carried a fireless section, and the recipes in them are ordinary dishes retimed for stored heat rather than a distinct cuisine. This one is plain scalloped potatoes, the standard American treatment of layered raw potato and milk, which appears under that name in household manuals from the middle of the nineteenth century and long outlived the box it was cooked in.