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Scalloped (POTATOES No Salt and pepper)
POTATOES No. 2 Salt and pepper 1 cup bread crumbs Butter 2 cups cold potatoes 2 cups cream sauce Cut the potatoes into cubes; mix well with the cream sauce, adding more seasoning if necessary; pour into a baking dish; cover with bread crumbs and small pieces of butter and bake for about half an hour.
A leftover dish: cooked potatoes bound in white sauce and baked under buttered crumbs. The recipe assumes you already have both cold boiled potatoes and a pan of cream sauce on hand.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given in the recipe. Half an hour at 375F browns the crumbs and heats the interior through; at 350F allow closer to 40 minutes.
- What "cream sauce" meansIn a book of this period it is a basic white sauce: butter and flour cooked together, then milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered. Proportions varied, but around 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk gives a sauce that coats a spoon; use less flour if you want it looser. It should be pourable, not stiff, since the potatoes will absorb some of it.
- The ratio is the pointEqual volumes of potato and sauce give a loose, spoonable gratin rather than a sliced one. If you want something that holds a cut edge, reduce the sauce to about 1 1/2 cups.
- Cold potatoes, not freshChilled boiled or steamed potatoes have firmed up and hold their cubes in the sauce. Freshly boiled ones break down and turn the dish to a purée. Waxy varieties behave best.
- Season more than feels necessaryThe instruction to add "more seasoning if necessary" is not filler. Potatoes and flour-thickened milk are both bland, and the salt should be tasted into the sauce before it meets the potatoes.
- CrumbsDried breadcrumbs from stale bread, not fine commercial crumbs. Tossing them with the melted butter first, instead of dotting butter on top, browns them evenly and avoids dry patches.
- YieldAbout four servings as a side dish; two cups of cubed cooked potato is roughly three-quarters of a pound.
Scalloped potatoes belong to a large family of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "scallops" — anything cut small, sauced, crumbed and baked, a usage often traced to the older sense of serving food in a scallop shell. The numbering here ("No. 2") indicates a preceding version on an earlier page; this one is built on cold boiled potatoes and sauce already made.