Home › Left-Over Vegetables › Creamed Potatoes
Creamed Potatoes
Cut cold boiled potatoes in rather thick slices.
Season with salt and a little white pepper. Toss them lightly in a little melted butter, being careful not to break them. Barely cover with rich milk and add one teaspoonful of flour to each cup of milk used. Cover and cook very slowly until the mixture is well thickened and creamy. Just before serving add a little finely chopped parsley. By way of variety, these may be served in turnip cups, which are made by cutting a slice from the bottom of small white turnips, paring them, and cooking in salted water; when tender, scoop out the inside, leaving a wall half an inch thick.
A straightforward use for yesterday's boiled potatoes, with one structural trick: the flour goes in with the milk rather than being cooked into a roux first.
- The hinge: very low heatFlour stirred straight into milk will scorch and catch the moment the pan gets too hot, and the potatoes will break down into mash. Use a heavy pan over the lowest workable heat, or a double boiler, and move the pan rather than the potatoes.
- "Rich milk"In this period the term meant unskimmed milk with the cream still in it. Whole milk works; whole milk with a splash of heavy cream is closer to the original. Skim milk will taste thin and thicken poorly.
- Flour proportionOne teaspoon per cup of milk is a deliberately light thickening — a sauce that coats, not a paste. Whisk it into the cold milk before it touches the pan so it does not lump.
- Handling the slicesCold boiled potatoes hold their shape better than warm ones when sliced and turned. Cut thick, around half an inch, and turn them with a spatula or by shaking the pan.
- Waxy over flouryBoiling potatoes with a firm texture survive the second cooking. Russets and other starchy bakers will crumble and thicken the sauce on their own.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes covered is usually enough for the sauce to thicken and the potatoes to heat through. There is nothing raw here; you are only reheating and reducing.
- Turnip cupsUse turnips about two inches across, boil 20-25 minutes until a knife goes in easily, then hollow them with a melon baller or teaspoon. Trim the base flat first, as directed, or they will tip on the plate.
- YieldRoughly four cold potatoes and a cup of milk serves three to four as a side dish.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished in American and British households from the 1890s through the First World War, when domestic-science writers turned thrift into a teachable subject. Creamed vegetables were the workhorse of that project: a thin milk sauce made almost anything from the previous day's table presentable again, and cold boiled potatoes were a common surplus in a kitchen that boiled a pot of them daily. The turnip cups are the period's other instinct showing through — the conviction that a reheated dish needed a little architecture to earn a place at dinner. Serving one vegetable inside another was familiar in the tomato-cup and pepper-case style of the era, and it cost only the cook's time, which was the one ingredient such books never counted.