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Scalloped (Pint sliced raw potatoes cup)
1 pint sliced raw potatoes 1 cup scalded milk 1 large tablespoon butter POTATOES No. 1 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon pepper Butter a baking dish and in the bottom put a layer of the potatoes. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and flour and dot with small pieces of butter. Repeat until the materials are used; pour the scalded milk over all and bake in a moderate oven for forty-five or fifty minutes. 1
A plain layered scallop with no cheese and no pre-made sauce — the flour, butter and milk thicken themselves in the dish. A few of the measures and the oven wording need translating.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven is generally taken as about 350F. Forty-five to fifty minutes suits thinly sliced potatoes; thicker slices will need longer, so test with a knife point.
- A pint of sliced potatoesThis is a volume measure, not a weight: 2 cups of slices, perhaps three-quarters of a pound of potatoes. It fills a small dish — two servings, or three as a side.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a scant 1/8 teaspoon of pepper. The salt at 1/2 teaspoon total is modest for a pound of potatoes; taste and add.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below a simmer, until it steams and shows bubbles at the edge. Scalding is often linked to the handling of raw milk; whatever its origin, it matters here because hot milk starts the starch and flour thickening at once instead of leaving a watery layer under the potatoes.
- The hinge is the flourThere is no roux and no white sauce, so the flour must go on in a thin even dusting over each layer. Dumped in clumps it will not hydrate and you get raw floury pockets; a small sieve or shaker is worth using.
- Potato choiceA starchy or all-purpose potato (russet, Yukon Gold) gives the creamy binding this method depends on. Waxy salad potatoes hold their slices apart and the milk stays thin.
- Cover, then uncoverThe recipe says nothing about covering. Covering for the first half hour keeps the top slices from drying out above the milk line, then uncover to brown. Set the dish on a sheet pan — milk scallops boil over.
Scalloped dishes are usually connected with the old escalop or collop — a thin slice — though the derivation is disputed and the shell-shaped dish is also invoked; by the nineteenth century "to scallop" in English and American kitchens meant to bake something sliced in layers with crumbs, butter or milk. This version is the barest form of it: no cheese, no cream, no crumb topping, just potato, flour, butter and milk doing the work, and the "No. 1" implies further scalloped potato recipes alongside it. Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf era, when publishers sold cookery in binder form so a cook could add pages, and its vegetable chapter reflects the domestic-science teaching of the day — small exact quantities, milk scalded as a matter of course, and seasoning measured down to the saltspoon.