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Scallop of Baked Potatoes and Cheese
Peel the left-over potatoes as soon as the meal is over. When ready to use, season them well with salt, pepper, and melted butter. In a buttered baking-dish arrange alternate layers of potatoes, grated cheese, and white sauce No. 2 (see page 68), having sauce on top. Sprinkle very lightly with buttered crumbs and heat in oven.
A gratin built from yesterday's baked potatoes, written for cooks who already knew what "white sauce No. 2" meant. The instructions leave out both the sauce and the oven, so here are the numbers.
- Peel them warm, and mean itThis is the hinge of the recipe. The skin of a baked potato slips off cleanly while the potato is still warm. Cold baked potatoes peel badly and slice worse.
- White sauce No. 2The sauce itself is on page 68 and not reproduced here. In books of this period numbered white sauces generally run thin to thick, so No. 2 is most likely the medium one -- roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. You will want roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups for a dish serving four.
- "Heat in oven"Everything here is already cooked, so this is only about browning and bubbling: 375-400F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the sauce shows at the edges and the crumbs have colored. If the potatoes went in cold, allow closer to 35 minutes.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe does not say which cheese. Something firm and well-aged, of the sharp Cheddar type, grates and melts properly here; fresh mozzarella or a pre-shredded blend with anti-caking starch will go stringy or grainy. Figure 4 to 6 ounces.
- Season the potatoes separatelyThe recipe seasons and butters the potatoes before layering rather than relying on the sauce for flavour. Taste a piece before it goes in the dish.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, about 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs. "Very lightly" is deliberate: a heavy crust over a sauced dish steams instead of crisping.
- Slicing and yieldCut the potatoes about 1/4 inch thick so the layers set rather than collapse. Three or four medium baked potatoes fill a 1-quart dish and serve four as a side.
"Scallop," also spelled escallop, is conventionally explained as food baked in a sauce with a crumb top, originally in a shell or shell-shaped dish and by the late nineteenth century in any buttered baking dish; the derivation from the shell is the usual account rather than a settled one. Books of leftovers like this one belonged to an American genre associated with the domestic-science movement, roughly the 1890s into the 1920s, whose writers treated household thrift as a technical discipline and cross-referenced their own numbered foundation sauces the way a chemistry manual cites a reagent. The instruction to peel the potatoes the moment the meal is over is characteristic of the type: the cook is expected to plan tomorrow's dish before today's plates are cleared.