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Potatoes in Kentucky Style
Slice thin as for frying, let remain in cold water half an hour; put into pudding-dish or dripping-pan, with salt, pepper, and some milk-about half a pint to an ordinary dish; put into oven and bake for an hour; take out and add a lump of butter half the size of an egg, cut into small bits and scattered over the top. Slicing allows the interior of each potato to be examined, hence its value where potatoes are doubtful, though poor ones are not of necessity required. Soaking in cold water hardens the slices, so that they will hold their shape. The milk serves to cook them through, and to make a nice brown on the top; the quantity can only be learned by experience; if just a little is left as a rich gravy, moistening all the slices, then it is right. In a year of small and poor potatoes, this method of serving them will be very welcome to many a housekeeper.-Mrs. C. M. Nichols, Springfield.
A plain scalloped potato with no flour, no cheese and no cream — the milk alone does the work. A few details need translating.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as is usual in wood-stove cookbooks. For a modern oven a moderate heat of about 350F suits the full hour; much hotter and the milk is apt to scorch before the slices soften.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. The author is honest that the amount depends on the dish — aim for milk coming about two-thirds up the sliced potatoes, and judge success by whether a little rich gravy remains at the end rather than a dry pan or a soupy one.
- Butter the size of half an eggRoughly one ounce, two tablespoons. It goes on at the end, not the beginning, so it melts over the browned top instead of frying into the milk.
- The soaking is not optionalThirty minutes in cold water rinses off surface starch and firms the slices so they keep their shape. Drain and pat them dry before layering, or the extra water thins the milk.
- Slice thickness"Thin as for frying" means about an eighth of an inch — a mandoline or the slicing blade of a food processor. Uneven slices give you both raw and collapsed potato in the same dish.
- Whole milk, not skimThe browning on top depends on milk solids and a little fat. Skim milk will cook the potatoes but leaves the surface pale and the gravy thin.
- SaltSeason each layer as you build it rather than dumping salt on top; potatoes absorb very little from the surface once the milk sets around them.
Scalloped potatoes in milk were standard American household cookery by the 1880s, and the appeal of this version is frankly economic: Mrs. Nichols recommends slicing partly because it lets the cook inspect the inside of every potato, which mattered in a season when the crop came in small or poor — though she is careful to add that poor potatoes "are not of necessity required." The nineteenth century saw repeated poor potato years in the United States, and cookbooks of the period offer methods for stretching or rescuing damaged roots. The attribution to a Mrs. C. M. Nichols of Springfield is typical of the compiled-cookbook format, which gathered receipts from named contributing housekeepers and traded on the authority of real kitchens rather than a single author. The absence of flour, cheese or cream marks this as a plainer line of scalloped potato.