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Potatoes au Gratin
Put Creamed Potatoes in buttered baking-dish, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake on centre grate until crumbs are brown.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you already have a pan of Creamed Potatoes and a bowl of buttered crumbs on hand, as a reader of this book would. Both need translating.
- Creamed Potatoes, in this bookCold boiled potatoes cut in dice or thin slices, folded into a white sauce and seasoned with salt and pepper; a workable proportion is about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk for every 2 cups of potato. It is essentially a way of using up cold boiled potatoes rather than freshly cooked ones.
- Buttered crumbsFine dry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, the standard ratio in this book being about 2 to 4 tablespoons butter per cup of crumbs. Soft fresh crumbs will absorb sauce and stay pale rather than crisping.
- "Centre grate"A range instruction meaning the middle rack of the oven. The book gives no temperature; on a modern oven the centre rack of a moderately hot oven, around 400F, will serve.
- TimeThe recipe times itself by colour, which is correct — the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through. Figure 20 to 25 minutes for the crumbs to brown and the sauce to bubble at the edges.
- No cheeseDespite the name, there is none here. Adding a half cup of grated cheese to the crumbs works, but it is a different dish from the one written.
- Dish and yieldA shallow baking dish gives the best crumb-to-potato ratio. Four cups of creamed potatoes fills a 1 1/2-quart dish and serves four to six as a side.
- Sauce consistencyMake the sauce looser than looks right. It tightens considerably in the oven, and a stiff white sauce going in comes out solid.
Gratin is French and refers to the crust, not to cheese — the word is bound up with gratter, to scrape, the browned scrapings from the dish being the point of the exercise. In late nineteenth-century American cookery the term was applied fairly loosely to anything finished with buttered crumbs under top heat, which is exactly what Fannie Farmer means by it; the near-universal modern assumption that au gratin implies cheese sauce came later. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the book's method: base preparations such as white sauce, creamed vegetables and buttered crumbs are taught once and then referred to by name, so a single sentence can carry a whole dish. It also belongs to the era's frugal treatment of cold boiled potatoes.