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Potatoes, Vaudoise
Peel and thoroughly wash four good-sized potatoes, cut them in quarter-inch slices, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; roll well the potatoes in the seasoning and arrange a third part in the bottom of a well-buttered baking dish; sprinkle two tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese over them, arrange another third potato on top, sprinkle two tablespoons grated Swiss cheese over their surface and arrange a few bits of butter on top. Finish by adding the rest of the potatoes on top of the cheese, sprinkle two tablespoons bread crumbs over, add half ounce butter in small bits on top and set the dish in a moderate oven to bake for fifty minutes. Remove and serve.
A layered potato gratin with no liquid in it, which is the one thing to plan around. Everything else translates directly.
- Moderate ovenSet it to 350F. Fifty minutes at that temperature will cook quarter-inch slices through if the dish is shallow and the layers are snug.
- The dryness problemAs written the potatoes bake on butter and cheese alone, and the top third can leather over before the bottom is tender. Cover the dish for the first 30 minutes and uncover to brown, or add about half a cup of milk or cream poured down the side, as many potato gratins do.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg across four potatoes is assertive but correct for the style.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon. "A few bits of butter" on the middle layer is another tablespoon or so; the dish wants around 3 tablespoons in total counting the buttered dish.
- Swiss cheeseRead this as Gruyère or Emmental, not the mild pre-sliced sandwich cheese sold as "Swiss" in the United States. Gruyère melts cleanly and is the likeliest reading here.
- Slicing and rinsingQuarter-inch slices, cut evenly, are what make the timing work; a mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor is worth using. Do not soak the slices after cutting, and dry them if they have been washed whole, since surface starch helps the layers hold together.
- YieldFour potatoes and the four tablespoons of cheese serve four as a side dish. Let it stand ten minutes out of the oven before cutting.
"Vaudoise" means from the Canton of Vaud, the French-speaking Swiss canton on Lake Geneva, not far from the Gruyère cheese country, and the recipe is a plain statement of what that region does with potatoes: layer them with hard mountain cheese and bake. The nutmeg and the pairing of Parmesan with a Swiss cheese suggest a professional kitchen rather than a farmhouse one. Gratins of this kind are generally traced to the Alpine practice of cooking with what kept through winter, potatoes and aged cheese being two of the few things that did, though the specific attachment of the name to Vaud may tell you more about nineteenth-century menu French than about any single village dish.