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Potatoes and Cheese (Wash some raw potatoes peel)
Wash some raw potatoes, peel them, cut them into very thin round slices. Take a dish which will stand the oven, and be nice enough to go on the table, and put in it a layer of the slices sprinkled with pepper, salt, a little flour, and plenty of grated Gruyere. Continue in this way, finishing with a layer of cheese, and a little flour. Put the dish in the oven, which must not be a very hot one, and cook gently. For a medium pie dish you will find that half an hour will be sufficient to cook the potatoes.
York Ham, Sweetbreads, Madeira Sauce Heat the ham in a double saucepan (bain marie). Boil the sweetbreads, blanch them and let them fry in some butter. Take flour and butter and melt them to a thick sauce, adding a tumbler of water and Liebig which will turn your sauce brown. Fry half a pound of mushrooms in butter and when brown, add them and the liquor to your sauce with a good glass of madeira or sherry. Place your ham in the middle of the dish, surround it with the sweetbreads, and pour over all the Madeira sauce.
Two dishes run together on one page: a bare-bones potato and cheese gratin, and a composed plate of ham and sweetbreads in Madeira sauce. Both assume a cook who already knows the shape of the dish, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- Slice thinness is the whole gratinThere is no milk, cream or stock in this dish — the potatoes cook in their own moisture and the fat of the cheese. That only works if the slices are genuinely thin, about 1/16 inch on a mandoline, and pressed down flat so there are no air pockets.
- "Not a very hot oven"A moderate oven; modern equivalence tables usually put that somewhere around 325-350F, though the book names no figure. Covering the dish for the first part will let the potatoes steam, then uncover to brown the top layer of cheese.
- Half an hour is optimisticHalf an hour may be tight -- with no added liquid, gratins of this kind can want considerably longer, particularly if the slices run thicker than the recipe implies. Test with a knife tip through the centre rather than trusting the clock; underdone potato in a gratin is the common failure.
- Gruyère and the flourGruyere and the flour -- the flour dusted between the layers most likely thickens and takes up the fat the cheese renders, so the dish does not swim in grease. Use a real aged Gruyere or Comte, coarsely grated; pre-shredded cheese is usually coated with anti-caking starch or cellulose and behaves differently.
- LiebigLiebig's Extract of Meat was a dark, salty beef concentrate sold in pots, and a forerunner of the commercial beef extracts of the period alongside rivals such as Bovril. A teaspoon of beef extract or a concentrated demi-glace gives the same brown colour and savour. It is very salty, so season the sauce at the end.
- A tumblerA tumbler is roughly 8 fluid ounces, one cup. The "good glass" of Madeira is about 3 to 4 ounces, and it should be added early enough to lose its raw alcohol edge — a few minutes at a simmer.
- Sweetbreads take preparation the recipe skipsVeal sweetbreads need several hours of soaking in cold water, changed often, before the brief boil the author calls "boil the sweetbreads, blanch them." After blanching, press them between two plates under a weight until cold, peel off the membrane, then slice and fry in butter. Ask a butcher to order them; they are rarely on display.
- The hamYork ham was a mild dry-cured ham, sold both raw on the bone and ready-cooked. A thick slice of good cooked gammon or a bone-in cooked ham stands in. The bain-marie is only to warm it through -- direct heat dries it and tightens the fibres.
- YieldThe gratin as written serves about four as a side. The ham and sweetbread dish, with its half pound of mushrooms, would serve about four as a main course; the recipe never states how much ham or how many sweetbreads.
The Belgian Cook-Book was assembled in Britain during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, and sold in aid of relief funds -- which explains the compressed, conversational style: these are dishes set down from memory by home cooks rather than drafted by a professional. The potato gratin is economy in its plainest form, four cheap things layered in one dish that goes straight from oven to table, and it belongs to the same broad family as the gratins of northern France and Wallonia. The ham with sweetbreads and Madeira is the opposite: a well-off household's dish, with York ham and with offal treated as a delicacy rather than a thrift cut. Liebig's Extract of Meat, which browns the sauce, was one of the era's great industrial convenience products, and its appearance here shows that commercial extracts had found a settled place in domestic cooking.