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Escalloped Potatoes
Wash, pare, soak, and cut four potatoes in one-forth inch slices. Put a layer in buttered baking-dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and dot over with onehalf tablespoon butter; repeat. Add hot milk until it may be seen through top layer, bake one and one-fourth hours or until potato is soft.
Farmer gives no oven temperature and no milk quantity, which are the two things a modern cook needs before starting. Everything else in the method still holds up.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F, covered for the first 45 minutes and uncovered after that so the top browns. The 1 1/4 hours in the original is realistic at that heat for quarter-inch slices.
- How much milk"Until it may be seen through top layer" works out to roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups for four medium potatoes in a small dish. Pour it down the side rather than over the top so the flour dredge is not washed off.
- Scale of the butter and flourHalf a tablespoon of butter per layer means about 1 tablespoon total. The flour is not measured in the original; a light dredge over each layer is what is meant. The flour plus milk is what thickens into the sauce, so do not skip it.
- SoakingFarmer's era soaked pared potatoes to keep them from discoloring while other work was done. Soaking also pulls out surface starch, so if you want a thicker sauce, skip the soak or dry the slices well and rely on the flour.
- Hot milk mattersCold milk drops the dish temperature and lengthens the baking time. Heat the milk before adding it, as the recipe specifies.
- Slice thicknessKeep to a genuine quarter inch and keep it even; a mandoline set to that thickness is worth using. Thick strays stay hard while everything around them collapses.
- CurdlingIf the milk breaks into curds, the oven is most likely too hot. Steady moderate heat and a covered start help guard against it.
- YieldFour potatoes serves three to four as a side dish, baked in a dish of about 1 to 1 1/2 quarts.
Escalloped dishes are usually traced to the old sense of "scallop" -- food baked in a shell or shallow dish, sauced and often crumbed -- though a derivation from "collop," a slice, has also been argued; by the nineteenth century the word had drifted to mean almost any layered, milk-sauced bake. Fannie Farmer's version is notable for what it leaves out: no pre-made white sauce, no cheese, no cracker crumbs. The flour is simply dredged between the layers and left to thicken in the milk as the potatoes cook, a labor-saving trick that one might read as reflecting the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book's interest in teaching principles cheaply. In the 1896 edition, potatoes sit within the vegetables section rather than in a chapter of their own.