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Creamed Potatoes
Cut into cubes or dice about half a pound of cold boiled potatoes and place them in a shallow bakingpan, pouring over them sufficient milk or cream to cover them, put the pan in the oven or on the side of the fire and cook gently until nearly all the milk is absorbed; then add a tablespoonful of butter a teaspoonful each of finely-chopped parsley and salt and half a saltspoonful of pepper mixed well together. When they have become thoroughly warmed, turn them into a dish, and serve at once.
A simple side dish built on leftovers, and the sort of thing Oscar Tschirky expected a cook to produce without a formal white sauce. Two details need translating and one measurement needs a second look.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful is an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper. Add it by eye rather than trying to measure it.
- The salt is too muchA full teaspoon of salt for half a pound of potatoes will overwhelm the dish, particularly if the potatoes were boiled in salted water. Start with a quarter teaspoon and taste.
- "On the side of the fire"This means the cooler edge of a range top, where a pan holds a bare simmer. On a modern hob that is the lowest setting; if you use the oven, as the recipe also allows, a moderate one (somewhere around 325-350F, uncovered) will do, though the book gives no temperature.
- Milk versus creamWhole milk reduced hard can catch or separate around the potatoes. Cream, or a mix of half milk and half cream, is more forgiving over the time this takes; the recipe gives no timing, only 'until nearly all the milk is absorbed'.
- Which potatoesCold boiled waxy potatoes hold their cubes; floury bakers will collapse into a mash as the milk reduces. If that is what you have, expect something closer to a purée and shorten the cooking.
- YieldHalf a pound serves two as a side dish. The proportions scale directly, though a wider pan is needed so the milk still just covers.
- Finish off the heatThe butter and parsley go in at the end and only need warming through. Boiling the parsley in the milk turns it drab and dulls its flavour.
Creamed potatoes belong to a broad family of American leftover cookery, in which cold boiled potatoes were revived with milk, butter or fried scraps rather than thrown out — a similar impulse to the one behind hashed brown potatoes and Lyonnaise potatoes (potatoes O'Brien is usually dated somewhat later, around the turn of the century). What distinguishes Oscar's version is that it uses no flour and no separately made sauce: the potatoes are simply stewed in milk until the starch they release thickens what is left, a technique also found in French gratins. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his large collection in 1896, and it is full of these unglamorous working entries alongside the hotel's showpieces, which suggests the book was meant to serve the household cook as well as the admirer of grand hotel dining.