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Scalloped Potatoes
For this dish, peel raw potatoes and cut them into thin slices. Place in the baking-dish a layer of the potato one inch deep, season with salt and pepper and add a dusting of flour and a dot of butter here and there. Then add another layer of the potato and seasoning as before and so continue until the dish is full. Add milk enough to moisten (about one-half pint to every quart of the potato), cover and bake one and one-fourth hours, removing the cover during the last fifteen minutes to brown the top. Serve in the baking-dish, wrapping a napkin about the dish if it is unsightly.
A plain gratin with no oven temperature given, which is the one thing the modern cook has to supply. Everything else in it still works.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your range. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the hour and a quarter given for potatoes sliced about an eighth of an inch thick. A hotter oven risks the milk catching at the edges before the centre is tender.
- Half a pint to a quartThat is one cup of milk to every four cups of sliced potato: enough to moisten the layers, not to submerge them. A 2-quart dish takes roughly 2 lb of potatoes, and milk in the recipe's proportion, around a pint and a half of sliced potato per half pint of milk.
- Slice thickness is the hinge"Thin slices" here means thin enough to cook through in the milk. An eighth of an inch, mandoline or steady knife. Thick slices are why scalloped potatoes come out of the oven with a browned top and hard centres.
- The one-inch layersBuilding in one-inch strata leaves the seasoning and flour in bands rather than through the dish. Two or three shallow layers season more evenly, and the flour dusting helps thicken the milk and makes it less likely to separate.
- Potato choiceA starchy or all-purpose potato — russet, Maris Piper, Yukon Gold — gives up starch and thickens the milk. Waxy salad potatoes stay separate and the liquid runs.
- Milk and curdlingWhole milk holds together better than skim. Replacing a quarter of it with cream makes the dish more forgiving, particularly if the oven runs hot.
- Covered, then uncoveredThe cover traps steam and cooks the interior; the last fifteen minutes uncovered browns the top. If it has not coloured, a minute or two under the broiler finishes it without drying the dish out.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of potatoes serves four to six as a side. Let it stand ten minutes out of the oven so the milk sets rather than flooding the plate.
"Scalloped" and its older spelling "escalloped" are usually traced to cooking or serving in a scallop shell or shell-shaped dish, with escalope, a thin slice — the same word behind the veal escalope — a related later sense of the same Old French root rather than the source; by the nineteenth century in English the word had come to mean anything sliced, layered with seasoning and baked with milk or crumbs, whether oysters, tomatoes or potatoes. Potatoes were the cheapest possible version and turn up in American household manuals of the period. The closing instruction is the most dated part: The Butterick Cook Book came from the publisher of dress patterns and The Delineator, and was written for a middle-class household that cared how the table looked, so a scorched or plain earthenware baking-dish went to the table wrapped in a folded napkin — presumably rather than being decanted into something prettier and losing its heat.