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Escalloped Vegetables
Creamed Sauce 1/2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 2 Tablespoons Butter or Butter Substitute 1 Cup Milk 1/4 Teaspoon Salt Use equal portions of sauce and vegetables. Arrange in alternate layers in a baking dish. Cover with bread crumbs and bake in oven until browned.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century bride's books: a white sauce, any cooked vegetable, crumbs, heat. The proportions are the only fixed part, and one of them has been garbled in the original typesetting.
- The cornstarch amount is unreliable"1/2 Tablespoons Cornstarch" may well be a dropped digit for 1 1/2 tablespoons. Note that cornstarch thickens more strongly than flour, so about a tablespoon per cup of milk already gives a medium sauce; half a tablespoon would give a thinner one, which may not hold the layers together.
- Cook the starch outMelt the butter, stir in the cornstarch, add the milk gradually and bring it to a full boil for a minute or two. Cornstarch sauces only reach their full thickness at the boil, and an undercooked one tastes chalky.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, for 25 to 30 minutes will heat the dish through and brown the crumbs; if the filling is already hot, 400F for 15 minutes browns faster.
- The vegetables must be cooked firstThe vegetables are best cooked first -- "Equal portions of sauce and vegetables" reads as an instruction for already-cooked vegetables, and escalloped dishes were often a way of using them up. Raw potato, carrot or cauliflower would need a much longer, slower bake than the crumbs take to colour.
- Butter substituteMost likely oleomargarine, or possibly a vegetable shortening. Any modern margarine or butter works; shortening gives a flatter flavour.
- CrumbsDry bread crumbs alone tend to scorch before browning evenly. Tossing them with a little melted butter first is commonly recommended and gives a better crust.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt per cup of milk is modest for a whole baked dish. Pepper, a grating of nutmeg or a handful of grated cheese are all in keeping.
- YieldOne cup of sauce plus one cup of vegetables gives about two cups, enough for a pint-sized dish and two or three side servings. Scale in one-cup units.
"Escalloped" (also scalloped) is generally traced to the old sense of cooking something in a scallop shell, and by the nineteenth century it meant any dish layered with sauce and crumbs and browned in the oven. Books written for new housekeepers leaned on it heavily because it turned yesterday's boiled vegetables into a dish worth putting on the table, and because a single white-sauce formula, memorised once, covered dozens of meals. That is why this entry gives proportions rather than a named dish: the vegetable was left to the cook, from whatever the garden or the icebox held.