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Potatoes in Custard
Peel and finely slice twelve new medium potatoes and place in baking dish. Crack two fresh eggs, add yolks of two others, beat them up, then dilute with three-quarters of a pint of broth. Season with teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg; sharply mix. Strain through a Chinese strainer over the potatoes, lightly mix, set in oven forty minutes. Remove and serve in the same dish.
A custard-bound potato dish closer to a French gratin dauphinois made with broth than to anything sweet. The original assumes you know how a custard behaves, so the two things it leaves out are the oven temperature and the doneness cue.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is the sensible modern reading: much hotter and the egg mixture curdles and weeps around the edges before the potatoes are cooked through.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. The measure here is for grated nutmeg; against twelve potatoes that reads as a light background note rather than a dominant flavour.
- Three-quarters of a pintRoughly 1 1/2 cups of broth (a US pint being 16 oz). If the book is following British measure it would be closer to 1 3/4 cups; start with 1 1/2 and add more only if the slices are not just covered.
- Chinese strainerA chinois -- the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works. The point is to catch the chalazae and any threads of white so the custard sets smooth.
- Broth temperatureAdd the broth cool or barely warm. Hot stock poured into four beaten eggs will scramble them in the bowl, and no amount of straining afterwards recovers the texture.
- Potato choice"New" potatoes means waxy, and that matters: waxy slices hold their shape in the custard, while a floury baking potato collapses into starch and thickens the liquid into paste. Slice about 1/8 inch, thin enough to cook in the time given.
- Timing and donenessForty minutes suits a shallow dish in a moderate oven. Judge it by two tests rather than the clock -- a knife should meet no resistance in the potatoes, and the custard should be set to a slight wobble at the centre. A deep dish can want an hour.
- YieldTwelve medium potatoes is anywhere from about 2 1/2 lb of small new potatoes to 4 lb of larger ones, so six to eight servings as a side, depending. Butter the baking dish generously, since it goes to the table and nothing will lift cleanly out of a dry one.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the fingerprints of a professional French kitchen are all over the page -- the casual instruction to strain through a Chinese strainer, the yolks added to whole eggs to enrich without loosening the set, the dish that goes from oven to table. Potatoes baked in an egg-and-liquid custard belong to the same family as gratin dauphinois, which is generally traced to the Dauphiné — more precisely, to the Dauphiné region of southeastern France. Filippini's use of broth instead of milk or cream is the frugal, savory version.