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Stewed Potatoes
Boil five good-sized, sound potatoes in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt for thirty-five minutes; peel and slice them rather thin. Heat half ounce butter in a saucepan, add one teaspoon flour, mixing well. Now add one and a half gills boiling milk and half gill hot cream. Mix well with wire whisk. Drop the potatoes into the pan. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg, also one-half teaspoon butter. Toss them well and let cook for ten minutes. Pour on a hot dish, sprinkle half teaspoon chopped parsley over and serve.
A plain cream-sauce potato dish that depends almost entirely on how you handle the slices once they hit the pan. Read the measures carefully — this book counts in gills and saltspoons.
- 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 puts the pepper at 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg at 1/4 teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe potatoes are already fully cooked, so the ten minutes in the pan is only to warm them and let the sauce cling. "Toss them well" means lifting from underneath with a spatula or shaking the pan; a spoon stirred through boiled potato slices turns the dish into mash.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne teaspoon of flour to a cup of liquid is barely a binder. It thickens further as starch leaches from the warm slices, which is the point — expect a loose, coating sauce rather than a gratin filling. If it tightens too much, loosen with a splash of hot milk.
- Boiling timeThirty-five minutes suits large whole potatoes; smaller ones will be done in 20-25. Test with a skewer at the center rather than trusting the clock, and drain them well — waterlogged slices dilute the sauce.
- Peel them warmBoiling in the skin keeps the flesh from absorbing water. Peel while still hot enough to handle, using a cloth. The recipe says to slice 'rather thin'; keep the slices thin but sturdy enough to hold together during the tossing.
- Keep the milk hotBoth the milk and the cream go in hot for a reason: cold liquid dropped onto a teaspoon of flour and a tablespoon of butter will lump immediately. Whisk it in off the heat if the roux is fizzing hard.
- Choice of potatoA waxy or all-purpose potato — Yukon Gold, red-skinned, fingerling — holds its slice. A russet will crumble at the toss, though it makes a thicker sauce if you don't mind the texture.
- YieldFive large potatoes serve four as a side dish. It is best served straight from the pan; reheated, the sauce breaks and the slices go grainy.
This is the standard French pommes de terre à la crème as it reached American hotel kitchens: potatoes boiled in their skins, sliced, and finished in a very light white sauce with nutmeg, a seasoning often used in milk-based sauces in nineteenth-century cooking. The vocabulary — gills, saltspoons, and the instruction to mix with a wire whisk — was common across general American and British cookbooks of the period, translating method into home quantities. The presence of both milk and cream, in that ratio, is a professional habit as much as a matter of richness. The recipe is titled simply 'Stewed Potatoes'.