Home › Vegetables › Scalloped Potatoes
Scalloped Potatoes
6 medium-sized potatoes
Milk
2 tablespoons flour
Salt and pepper
4 tablespoons butter
Pare raw potatoes and cut them into thin slices. Place in a baking-dish a layer of the potato one inch deep, season with salt and pepper, sprinkle a portion of the flour over each layer, add a part of the butter or butter substitute in bits. Then add another layer of the potato and seasoning, as before, and continue until the required amount is used. It is advisable not to have more than two or three layers because of difficulty in cooking. Add milk until it can be seen between the slices of potato, cover and bake one and one-fourth hour, or until potatoes are tender when pierced with a fork, removing the cover during the last fifteen minutes to brown the top. Serve from the baking-dish.
A plain gratin with no oven temperature and no measured milk, which is typical of the period. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A dish like this belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated hour and a quarter. Hotter and the milk will break and catch at the edges before the potato centres soften.
- How much milk"Until it can be seen between the slices" works out to roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups for six potatoes in a 2-quart dish. Pour it in slowly at the side and stop when it rises to just below the top layer.
- Slice thickness is the hingeEverything depends on the slices being thin and even, about 1/8 inch. A mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor gets you there. The original does not explain its warning against more than three layers beyond "difficulty in cooking" -- deeper assemblies simply do not cook through evenly.
- The flourTwo tablespoons dusted between layers is what thickens the milk into a sauce as it bakes. Toss the slices in it rather than sprinkling if you want it evenly distributed, and do not rinse the cut potatoes -- the surface starch helps.
- Butter substituteMargarine and vegetable shortening were the usual stand-ins. Such substitutes were recommended for household economy in American cookbooks over a long stretch of decades, so the phrase signals thrift rather than any one shortage. Butter is better here; four tablespoons across three layers is generous but correct.
- CoveringA lid or foil for the first hour traps steam and cooks the potato through; the last fifteen minutes uncovered browns the top. If it has not coloured, a minute or two under the broiler will finish it.
- YieldSix medium potatoes serve six as a side dish. It reheats well, covered, at 325F.
Scalloped potatoes are the English-language version of a technique found across northern Europe -- raw potato sliced thin, layered with fat and dairy, and baked slowly until the starch thickens the liquid into its own sauce. The word "scallop" here has a contested history: it is variously traced to cooking in scallop shells and to escalope or "collop," a thin slice, and by the nineteenth century "scalloped" in American cookbooks meant almost any dish of layered slices baked with sauce or crumbs. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, favours exactly this kind of recipe: cheap, forgiving, made from what is already in the house, and served in the dish it was cooked in to save washing up. The note about a "butter substitute" suggests, though it cannot fix, an era when household economy in fats was an assumed condition rather than a choice.