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Delmonico Potatoes
2 cups cooked potatoes, diced
Salt and pepper
2 cups medium white sauce
Buttered crums
Mix potatoes and sauce, pour into a buttered baking-dish, cover with crums and bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven.
A short, forgiving formula that assumes you already know how to make a white sauce and have leftover boiled potatoes on hand. The proportions are the whole recipe, so read them before you start.
- "Medium white sauce"In this period a medium white sauce means 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk, per cup of sauce. For the 2 cups called for here: 4 tablespoons each butter and flour, 2 cups milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. A thin sauce would leave the dish soupy; a thick one turns it to paste.
- Hot ovenRead that as 400-425F. Fifteen minutes is only long enough to heat through and brown the top, which is all it needs since everything in the dish is already cooked.
- Buttered crumsSoft or dry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs. Without the butter they scorch rather than brown. Panko works but browns faster; check at ten minutes.
- The potatoesCold cooked potatoes, cut in even 1/2-inch dice. Waxy or all-purpose potatoes hold their shape; a mealy baking potato will collapse into the sauce. Boiling them the day before and chilling them firms them usefully.
- SeasoningThe salt and pepper are listed with no quantity. Season the white sauce assertively before it meets the potatoes, which are bland and will absorb it.
- YieldAbout four side servings. The mixture comes to a full quart, so use a dish a little larger than 1 quart. Doubling works, but use a wide shallow dish so the crumb topping stays in proportion.
- BrowningIf the top is pale at fifteen minutes, run it under the broiler for a minute rather than extending the bake, which only dries the sauce.
The name honors Delmonico's, the New York restaurant that from the mid-nineteenth century onward set the standard for fine dining in America, and by 1900 "Delmonico" on a dish in a domestic cookbook functioned much as "deluxe" would later: it signaled richness and a restaurant pedigree rather than any documented recipe from the kitchen itself. A good many unrelated dishes carried the label. What the recipe really represents is the enormous reach of the white sauce in turn-of-the-century American cooking, taught as a set of memorized butter-flour-milk ratios (thin, medium, thick) that a cook applied to whatever was left in the larder: a use for yesterday's boiled potatoes, dressed up with a borrowed name.<br><br>Note that the spelling crums is the book's own; it is a long-standing variant spelling, though it has sometimes been linked to the simplified-spelling reform that briefly touched American cookbooks and school texts in the early twentieth century.</br></br>