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Potatoes and Cream
Mince cold boiled potatoes fine; put them into a spider with melted butter in it; let them fry a little in the butter well covered; then put in a fresh piece of butter, season with salt and pepper, and pour over cream or rich milk; let it boil up once and serve.
A creamed potato hash of the plainest kind, meant to use up yesterday's boiled potatoes. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes in a skillet.
- A spider is a skilletOriginally a cast-iron pan on three legs meant to stand over coals; by the 1870s the word simply meant a heavy frying pan. Cast iron is still the right choice here for the browning.
- "Mince fine" means chop, not mashCut the cold potatoes small, finer rather than coarser. Cold, firm boiled potatoes hold their shape in the pan; freshly boiled hot ones are likelier to collapse into paste.
- Cover, then uncoverThe instruction to fry "well covered" steams the potatoes soft. If you want browned edges, take the lid off for the last few minutes and leave them undisturbed rather than stirring.
- Two additions of butterThis is deliberate, not an error. The first butter fries the potatoes; the second goes in with the seasoning just before the cream, enriching the sauce rather than doing the frying.
- "Boil up once" is literalBring the cream just to a bubble and stop, as the recipe says, then serve. Long simmering only reduces the cream and risks a greasy sauce.
- Cream or rich milkThe recipe allows either. Half-and-half, or whole milk with a spoonful of cream, works as well as heavy cream here; use just enough to moisten the potatoes and boil up.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives none. Four medium potatoes, about 3 tablespoons butter in total and roughly half a cup of cream serves three or four as a side, or two at breakfast.
Creamed potatoes in one form or another appear in many American community cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, when cold boiled potatoes were a routine leftover and there was no refrigeration to keep them long. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s and sold for charity, and was later reissued in Canadian editions; it was assembled from contributions by named housekeepers, which is why the instructions read like one cook talking to another rather than a formal receipt: no quantities, no times, just the sequence and the assumption that the reader knows what her own pan does. The odd section heading, "Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen," belongs to the book's habit of scattering short domestic essays and servant anecdotes between the recipes. The word spider for a frying pan is recorded longest in New England and the inland North, and faded from general use in the early twentieth century.