Turn
Reheat two cups cold boiled potatoes, cut in dice, in one and one-half cups White Sauce I.
Two lines of text that assume you already have leftover boiled potatoes and a working knowledge of the sauce chapter. Both assumptions need filling in.
- What White Sauce I isA plain milk-and-flour béchamel from earlier in the same book: butter and flour cooked together, then scalded milk whisked in, with salt and pepper. Farmer's numbered sauces differ between editions and between the thick and thin versions, so check the ratio in your own copy; the medium version is roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of milk.
- The potatoes must be coldThe recipe specifies cold boiled potatoes, and cold potatoes are firmer and dice more neatly than hot ones, which tend to crumble as they are stirred in. Leftovers from the previous day are the obvious source.
- Reheat, do not boilBring the sauce to a bare simmer, fold the dice in, and hold it just below bubbling until heated through. Vigorous boiling and stirring will knock the edges off the potato dice.
- Sauce quantityOne and a half cups to two cups of potato gives a generously coated dish rather than a soupy one. If it tightens on standing, loosen with a spoonful of milk rather than more sauce.
- Season at the endThe potatoes will take up salt from the sauce as they warm, so taste after reheating rather than before.
- YieldTwo cups of potato will serve about four as a side dish. Grated cheese, chopped parsley, or a little chopped onion softened in the butter before the flour are common variations on creamed vegetables of this type.
- The heading'Turn' does not describe the dish and appears to be a stray fragment of the printed page rather than a title. The dish itself is the one usually known as creamed potatoes.
Creamed potatoes of this kind are less a dish than a filing system. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book teaches White Sauce once and thereafter refers to it by number, so that creamed potatoes, creamed onions, creamed codfish and scalloped dishes can be set down as two-line entries. The economy is easy to see: a household that boiled potatoes often would have cold ones on hand, and a milk sauce turned them into a hot vegetable course. The approach also reflects the cooking-school project itself, which aimed to teach method and proportion rather than a long list of individual dishes.