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Mashed Potatoes Au Gratin
6 potatoes riced
2 eggs
3 tablespoons butter
¼ cup grated cheese
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup buttered crums
½ teaspoon paprika
Add butter, seasoning and eggs to the hot riced potatoes. Beat until light and mound on a baking-dish. Cover with grated cheese and then with buttered crums to which the melted butter or butter substitute has been added. Bake fifteen minutes, or until the crums are brown.
A straightforward duchesse-style potato mound with a cheese and crumb crust. The original assumes you know the oven setting and the crumb technique, both of which are worth spelling out.
- The oven temperatureNo heat is given at all. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, suits the fifteen minutes specified: long enough to colour the crumbs without burning them before the cheese has melted through.
- Six potatoesRead this as about 2 lb of mealy potatoes — russets or another floury variety. Waxy potatoes give a denser result that will not beat as light.
- Riced means ricedBoil and drain the potatoes, then push them through a ricer or food mill while genuinely hot. A masher leaves lumps that show in a mound, and a food processor turns potato to glue.
- Add the eggs while hotThe whole eggs go into the hot potato and are beaten in, which helps them incorporate smoothly and lifts the mixture. The recipe is specific that the potatoes be hot at this stage.
- Buttered crumbsFresh or dried white breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter until each crumb is coated — roughly 2 tablespoons butter to the half cup. The recipe's phrasing is confusing: the butter belongs to the crumbs, not in addition to the three tablespoons already beaten into the potato.
- Butter substituteThe recipe does not say what substitute it has in mind; margarine is the likeliest reading for an American book of this kind. Butter gives a better crust.
- The cheeseA quarter cup of grated cheese is a light hand by modern taste. Assume a dry aged cheddar or a hard grating cheese; double it if you want the gratin to read as cheesy rather than as a browned crust.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. The mixture can be piped into individual mounds instead, in which case check at ten minutes.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its household books for the same audience that bought its magazines: middle-class women running a house with little or no help. Recipes like this one show the influence of the domestic-science movement. The dish itself is a thrifty relative of pommes duchesse, the French preparation of riced potato enriched with egg yolk and butter, piped and browned; here it is simplified to whole eggs and a single mound, with the grated cheese and buttered crumb topping that American cooks applied to almost anything designated au gratin. In French usage the gratin is properly the browned crust itself, not the cheese, though in English the sense had already shifted to mean cheese-topped and baked.