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French Chef (Cut four cold boiled potatoes)
Cut four cold boiled potatoes and six " hard-boiled" eggs in one-fourth inch slices. Put layer of potatoes in buttered baking-dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, cover with layer of eggs; repeat, and pour over two cups Thin White Sauce. Cover with buttered cracker crumbs and bake until the crumbs are brown.
A scalloped dish of leftovers, and the only real technique in it is the sauce. Get that right and the rest is assembly.
- Thin White SauceIn cookbooks of this period that generally means one tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper. It should coat a spoon barely; a thicker sauce turns the dish pasty as the potatoes absorb liquid in the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe's only guide is "bake until the crumbs are brown." A moderately hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 375-400F, will usually colour the top in twenty to thirty minutes, but go by the browned crumbs and the sauce bubbling at the edges rather than the clock.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCrush plain soda or water crackers and toss with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a third of a cup of crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs scorch in patches rather than browning evenly.
- The eggs are the weak pointSix hard-boiled eggs already fully set will go rubbery and slightly sulphurous with a long bake. Keep the time short and pull the dish as soon as the top colours.
- Cold potatoes on purposeFreshly boiled hot potatoes crumble under the knife. Chilled ones slice cleanly at the specified quarter inch and hold their shape in the sauce, which is why the recipe opens with "cold boiled".
- Dish size and yieldA shallow 1 1/2 to 2 quart baking dish will hold the two layers of each that "repeat" calls for. The quantities suggest roughly four servings as a supper dish, or six as a side.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper between the layers is not optional here. Potatoes, eggs and thin white sauce are all bland, and there is nothing else in the dish to carry flavour; a grating of nutmeg in the sauce is period-appropriate.
Scalloped dishes like this one are the backbone of the economical American cookbook: cold cooked food, a milk sauce, a crumb top, and a hot oven. Graded white sauces -- thin, medium, thick -- were a general convention of domestic-science cookery, though the particular grades vary by edition and author, and recipes were built on top of them, so a cook who had learned the sauce could produce this potato-and-egg dish, creamed codfish or scalloped oysters without learning anything new. The origin of the header "French Chef" is unknown; there is nothing especially French about the dish, whose reason for existence is Monday's potatoes and a surplus of eggs.