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Potatoes, Dijonnaise
Mix in a saucepan one tablespoon butter with one tablespoon flour, moisten with three gills broth, add one ounce grated, raw lean ham, one bay leaf and five medium, peeled, raw potatoes cut into thin slices. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and teaspoon French mustard. Mix a little, then boil for five minutes. Cover the pan and set in the oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, transfer them into a vegetable dish and serve.
A terse Delmonico's-style entry that assumes you know what a gill is and how hot an oven should be. It is essentially sliced potatoes braised in a thin mustard veloute, and it works well once the gaps are filled.
- Gills and saltspoonsThree gills is 1 1/2 cups of broth. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is about 1/2 teaspoon — assertive but correct for the dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for the 25-minute covered stage; cook until the potatoes are tender, and expect the pan to still hold liquid, since it is covered.
- French mustardThis means smooth Dijon, not the bright yellow American style, which is milder and sweeter and coloured with turmeric. A teaspoon of Dijon is the whole point of the name.
- The hinge: keep the mustard off the boilThe hinge: the mustard goes in before the boil -- Heat mutes mustard's pungency, and cooks often find long-cooked mustard turns harsh. At this quantity adding it with the seasoning, as written, is fine; just do not reduce the sauce aggressively afterward.
- Raw grated hamAn ounce of lean raw ham means a dry-cured ham such as prosciutto or country ham, grated on a coarse grater so it dissolves into the sauce as seasoning. Deli-sliced cooked ham will not give the same salt-and-cure depth; if you use it, cut back nothing else but expect a milder result.
- Potato choice and thicknessWaxy or all-purpose potatoes hold their slices; russets will collapse into a puree. Cut them about 1/8 inch thick so they cook through in the stated time.
- RouxA tablespoon each of butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups broth is a very light binding — the sauce should be barely thickened, since the potato starch will do the rest in the oven.
- YieldFive medium potatoes serve four as a side dish. Fish out the bay leaf before it goes to the table.
"Dijonnaise" is French menu shorthand for "in the style of Dijon," and in practice it generally signals mustard: the Burgundian city has been a centre of French mustard making since the medieval period, and Dijon-style mustard, made with verjuice or white wine rather than vinegar, was the smooth mustard of the professional kitchen by the nineteenth century. The recipe's compressed, imperative style — no yield, no oven temperature, no explanation — is typical of the big turn-of-the-century American compendiums written by hotel and restaurant chefs, which catalogued the classical French repertoire for readers who wanted the name of a dish as much as the method.