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Potatoes Au Gratin, Estragon
Cut four cold boiled potatoes into small square pieces, place in an enamelled pan with half teaspoon freshly chopped tarragon, half ounce good butter, gill milk, half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, saltspoon grated nutmeg, place on fire and cook for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Transfer potatoes into a baking dish, sprinkle a tablespoon Swiss cheese over, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, set in oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
A simple gratin that depends on cold, firm boiled potatoes and a very short simmer. The measurements are pre-standardisation and the oven temperature is left out entirely.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is usually reckoned at half a cup in American books (the imperial gill is 5 fl oz), so half a gill of cream is roughly 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so three saltspoons of pepper comes to something like 3/4 teaspoon: the dish is meant to be assertively peppered, but taste as you go.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. Since the potatoes are already cooked, the oven is only there to melt and colour the cheese, so a hot oven is needed for ten minutes to do anything; something in the region of 425F works, but this is a modern guess rather than anything the book states.
- Cold potatoes are the pointFreshly boiled potatoes fall apart when stirred in cream. Boil them the day before, chill, and cut into neat dice so they hold their shape through the ten minutes on the stove.
- Enamelled panProbably called for to keep a reactive surface off the milk, though the recipe does not say. Any modern stainless, enamelled cast iron or nonstick pan does the same job.
- EstragonSimply the French for tarragon. Use fresh; dried tarragon has a flat, hay-like character that will not carry the dish.
- Swiss cheeseIn this period the phrase means Gruyère or Emmental, not the sliced sandwich cheese sold under the name now. A tablespoon is sparse by modern taste; two or three grated tablespoons give proper browning.
- YieldFour potatoes serve two as a side, three at a stretch. The recipe scales directly.
Gratins of this kind sit comfortably in the hotel and restaurant cookery that influenced English-language cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, when French names were often attached to plain dishes to signal a certain standard of table. Tarragon was strongly associated with French-trained kitchens -- it is a defining note of bearnaise and appears in sauce ravigote -- and adding it to boiled potatoes gave a thrifty dish a name that could go on a menu. Cold boiled potatoes would have been a common leftover in households that boiled potatoes often, and gratins were one obvious use for them.