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Hashed Potatoes in Cream
Finely hash four medium, peeled, boiled potatoes. Drop them in a small saucepan, pour in one and a half gills cold milk and half gill cream. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon white pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding a teaspoon butter. Thoroughly mix with a wooden spoon, gently cook for twelve minutes, lightly mixing occasionally. Turn them into a deep dish and serve.
A plain creamed-potato side that depends almost entirely on heat control and on how you cut the potatoes. Two archaic measures need translating before you start.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup and half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which makes the seasoning 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp white pepper and 1/8 tsp nutmeg.
- "Hash" means dice, not mashThe potatoes should be cut into small, even cubes of roughly a quarter inch. The dish is meant to hold its shape in the cream, not to collapse into a puree.
- Boil the potatoes the day beforeUse cold, fully set boiled potatoes -- The recipe only calls for "boiled potatoes," but cold, fully set ones dice cleanly where warm ones crumble at the knife, so cooking them ahead helps. Waxy varieties hold up better here than a floury baking potato.
- Keep it below a simmerTwelve minutes is right only over gentle heat. If the milk boils it will catch on the pan bottom and the starch released by the potatoes will make the sauce gluey rather than creamy.
- The wooden spoon is deliberateStir sparingly -- Turn the cubes rather than crushing them; every extra stir frees more starch. The wooden spoon the recipe names was the standard utensil of the period, but it suits the job.
- Consistency at the endThe liquid should reduce to a loose coating, not a soup. If it is still thin at twelve minutes, give it another minute or two; if it tightens too fast, loosen with a spoonful of milk.
- YieldFour medium potatoes serve three to four as a side dish.
This comes from Alessandro Filippini's The International Cook Book, by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it shows his house style clearly: very small quantities, exact seasonings down to the saltspoon, and a preference for finishing a vegetable in dairy rather than in fat. Creamed and hashed potato dishes of this kind appear widely in American cookbooks and hotel cookery of the turn of the twentieth century, and they are an obvious use for already-boiled potatoes. Nutmeg with potatoes and cream runs through the classical French repertoire from gratins to purees, though it was also common in English and northern European cookery, so it is not by itself proof of a French-trained kitchen.