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Escalloped Potatoes
Peel and cut raw potatoes in slices 1 inch thick. Put a layer in a buttered baking dish, dot with butter, salt and pepper. Repeat until dish is 3/4 full. Pour scalded milk over the potatoes until it reaches the top layer. Bake at a temperature of 350°F. for an hour or until potatoes are soft.
A plain milk-and-butter gratin with no flour, no cheese and no cream. It works, but two details in the text need attention before it goes in the oven.
- That 1-inch sliceOne inch is unusually thick for scalloped potatoes, which are more often cut somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 inch, and the figure may be a misprint. At a full inch the slices are likely to be still firm after an hour in the oven. Cutting them thinner will give a more reliable result.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below boiling, around 180°F, when small bubbles ring the pan. Starting with hot milk shortens the bake and helps the potato starch begin to thicken it. Whole milk holds together better here than skim.
- No flour, so watch the curdleWith nothing but milk and potato starch to bind, the sauce can break into grains if the dish boils hard. Keep the oven at a steady 350°F and pull it back to 325°F if you see the surface bubbling violently.
- Cover, then uncoverThe recipe is silent on this. Covering for the first 40 minutes keeps the top slices from drying into leather; uncovering for the last 20 gives the browned surface that makes the dish worth eating.
- Choose a starchy potatoRussets or another floury variety release enough starch to thicken the milk. Waxy potatoes stay in distinct slices and leave a thin, watery liquid behind.
- Dish size and yieldA 2-quart baking dish feeds about six as a side. Roughly 2 pounds of potatoes and 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter will fill one; add scalded milk until it comes just level with the top layer, as the recipe directs, the amount depending on how thin the slices are and how closely they are packed.
- DonenessA thin knife should meet no resistance at the centre. If the top is browning before the middle softens, lay foil over it rather than lowering the heat.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was one of the free booklets Metropolitan Life Insurance Company sent to policyholders in the first half of the twentieth century, part of a wider industrial-welfare effort in which insurers issued advice on hygiene, nutrition and household management on the theory that healthier customers lived longer. This recipe is correspondingly plain and cheap: no cheese, no cream, no flour, and an oven temperature given as a number rather than in the older language of quick and slow ovens. "Escalloped" and "scalloped" are the same word, generally traced to the scallop shell, which lent its name first to dishes baked and served in shells and then to almost anything layered with sauce and crumbs and browned in the oven."