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Potatoes in Seven Ways
Sunday, peel, steam, mash, add milk, butter and salt, and then beat like cake-batter, the longer the better, till they are nice and light. This steaming and beating will be found a great improvement. Monday, baked potatoes in their jackets; if any are left they may be warmed over, peeling when cold, and then slicing. Tuesday, peel and bake with roast of beef.
Wednesday, prepare in Kentucky style.
Thursday, peel, steam, and serve whole.
Friday, "potatoes a la pancake;" peel, cut in thin slices lengthwise, sprinkle with pepper and salt, and fry in butter or beef drippings, turning like griddle-cakes. Saturday, potatoes boiled in their jackets.
Seven methods rather than one dish, laid out as a week's rotation so a cook need never repeat herself. Most translate directly; two need comment.
- The beating is where it goes wrongSunday's instruction to beat mashed potatoes "the longer the better" is the one line to ignore. Prolonged beating ruptures the starch cells and turns the mash gluey. Work them hot with a ricer or masher, fold in warm milk and butter, and stop as soon as they are smooth.
- Steaming instead of boilingThe advice to steam rather than boil is sound and still worth following: less water absorbed means a drier, fluffier mash that takes more butter. Peeled chunks steam in 15-20 minutes.
- "Kentucky style"The phrase is given without explanation and presumably points to another recipe in the book; without that page the instruction is unrecoverable.
- Baked in their jacketsNo temperature is given. Use 425F for 50-60 minutes for a medium russet, pricked first. The Monday leftovers are peeled cold and sliced before being warmed over; the recipe does not say how.
- Baked with the roastTuesday's potatoes go in the beef pan and rely on the fat and the oven already being hot. In a modern oven, peeled halves turned in the drippings need about 45-60 minutes at 400-425F, turned once.
- Beef drippingsCalled for on Friday alongside butter, and preferable to it for high-heat frying. Rendered beef fat from a roast keeps refrigerated for weeks; clarified butter or a neutral oil works if you have none.
- Potatoes a la pancakeLengthwise slices, cut thin, seasoned and fried flat in a heavy pan, turned once when the underside is brown. They are not crisped chips; expect tender slices with browned faces. About 10-12 minutes total over medium-high heat.
- QuantityNone is stated anywhere. Reckon on 6-8 oz of potato per person for any of the seven.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of American compilations issued in the 1880s that grew out of the earlier Buckeye Cookery tradition, and this page shows the genre's real preoccupation: not novelty but the management of monotony. A household ate potatoes every day, so the book organises them into a rotation, one method per weekday, and gives the cook a plan rather than a recipe. The details are period-specific in a telling way: baking the potatoes alongside the roast because the oven is already lit, frying in beef drippings because the fat from that roast was not thrown out, and reheating Monday's leftovers. The quasi-French "potatoes a la pancake" is the one flourish, an example of the a la construction being borrowed for a dish that is nothing of the kind.