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Delmonico Potatoes
To Potatoes au Gratin add one-third cup grated mild cheese, arranging potatoes and cheese in alternate layers before covering with crumbs.
Potatoes à l'Antlers Cook potatoes with jackets on, drain, and let stand twentyfour hours. Peel, and cut in small cubes. Put into a saucepan with two tablespoons butter to each two cups potatoes. Sprinkle with salt, and generously with paprika. Add one cup cream, and cook slowly forty minutes.
Two short variations that assume you already have Fannie Farmer's Potatoes au Gratin in front of you. The first is a cheese gratin; the second is something closer to creamed potatoes cooked down in a pan.
- The base recipePotatoes au Gratin in this book is cold boiled potatoes cut up, folded into a thin white sauce, turned into a buttered dish, topped with buttered crumbs and baked until the crumbs brown. Without it the Delmonico instruction makes no sense: you are layering the sauced potatoes with cheese, crumbs on top.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature, only "bake until crumbs are brown." The dish needs to heat through and brown, so a hot oven of about 400F for 20 to 25 minutes will do it; a moderate 350F will also work, given longer, if the dish went in cold.
- "Mild cheese"Likely a young factory cheddar or American cheese rather than anything sharp or aged. One-third cup grated is roughly an ounce to an ounce and a quarter. Aged cheddar or parmesan will overwhelm the white sauce; a mild cheddar, Monterey Jack or young Gouda is closer to the intent.
- The twenty-four hour restThis is the hinge of the second recipe, not a fussy detail. Potatoes boiled in their skins and left overnight firm up as the starch retrogrades, so the cubes hold their shape through forty minutes in cream instead of collapsing into mash. Refrigerate them, not the countertop rest the original implies.
- Cooking slowly for forty minutesWith one cup of cream to two cups of potato, this is a reduction as much as a cooking. Keep it at a bare simmer over low heat and shake or stir the pan gently; cream and butter will scorch on a thin modern pan long before forty minutes are up. Use heavy cream, not half-and-half, which will break.
- PaprikaMost likely sweet Hungarian paprika, used for colour and mild sweetness rather than heat. Modern smoked or hot paprika changes the dish entirely. Buy it recently; paprika loses both colour and flavour within a year.
- YieldNeither variation gives one. Both work from about two cups of cooked potato, which is two to three side servings, and the quantities double cleanly.
Both names are borrowed from dining rooms rather than from any technique. Delmonico's in New York was the benchmark American restaurant of the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s its name was attached in home cookbooks to almost any dish thought sufficiently refined, usually meaning cream, butter and cheese; the Delmonico potato that survives today is generally traced to this sort of borrowing rather than to a documented house recipe. The Antlers was the grand hotel at Colorado Springs, opened in the 1880s. That Fannie Farmer offers both as two-line addenda to a single base recipe tells you how the book was meant to be used: learn Potatoes au Gratin properly, then run the variations off it without a new set of instructions.