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Potatoes with Cheese
2 rounded tablespoon-1½ cups milk fuls crumbled 6 small cold potatoes, cheese sliced 3 tablespoonfuls but- 3 tablespoonfuls but- I chopped sweet bellter pepper 3 tablespoonfuls flour English walnuts Salt, paprika and Tabasco Melt butter in saucepan, add cheese. When cheese is partly melted put in flour and cook until smooth. Season and add milk slowly, stirring constantly until thoroughly blended. Butter a bakingdish, put in a layer of potatoes, sprinkle with chopped pepper, alternating potatoes and pepper until dish is full. Pour over this the cheese sauce. Sprinkle with the chopped walnuts and bits of butter. Brown and serve hot. The Spanish call this dish potatoes con queso. It is a Spanish receipt.
A cheese sauce poured over layered cold boiled potatoes and browned — a straightforward way to use up potatoes from the day before. The ingredient list runs in two columns and needs untangling before you start.
- What you actually needRoughly: 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1½ cups milk, 2 rounded tablespoons crumbled cheese, 6 small cold potatoes sliced (presumably boiled), 1 chopped sweet bell pepper, chopped English walnuts, and salt, paprika and Tabasco. Butter is listed twice in the original, 3 tablespoonfuls each time; the second entry is the butter dotted over the top before browning, so allow that additional 3 tablespoons.
- Cheese quantity is lowTwo rounded tablespoons of crumbled cheese in 1½ cups of milk gives a very mild sauce by modern taste. A firm, dry cheese — aged cheddar, or a dry Jack in keeping with the Spanish claim — at 4 to 6 ounces will give the dish the flavour its name promises.
- Order of operationsThe method has you melt butter, add cheese, then add flour. That is backwards for a smooth sauce. Cooking the flour in the butter first, then adding milk, then the cheese off the heat, avoids the graininess that comes of heating cheese in hot roux.
- Walnuts have no quantityNo amount is given. About ½ cup, roughly chopped, covers the top of a dish holding six potatoes without overwhelming the cheese.
- "Brown"No method or temperature is given at all; the instruction is simply to brown the top. Twenty to twenty-five minutes in a hot oven (around 400F), or five minutes under a broiler, browns the top and heats the potatoes through — they go in already cooked, so this is colour and heat, not cooking.
- The potatoesCold potatoes slice cleanly; warm ones crumble. Cut them thin, about a quarter inch, so the sauce reaches every layer. Plain boiled potatoes suit the dish best, as the recipe assumes.
- SeasoningSalt, paprika and Tabasco are all the seasoning there is. Season the sauce assertively before it goes over the potatoes, which are bland and will absorb it.
- YieldSix small potatoes and 1½ cups of sauce fill a small gratin dish and serve four as a side, two or three as a supper dish.
Books of "left overs" were a small publishing genre, appearing where domestic-science writers were pressing thrift on households as a matter of both economy and moral hygiene; a cold boiled potato was a resource, not a scrap. The closing note \>potatoes con queso — is the kind of attribution such books made freely and loosely. Papas con queso is a real and widespread formula across Spain and Latin America, but this particular version, built on a butter-and-flour white sauce, a bell pepper and a topping of English walnuts, is squarely in the American white-sauce tradition of household cookery. The paprika and Tabasco do most of the work of suggesting somewhere further south.