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Potatoes Au Gratin
Remove the skins from boiled or baked potatoes and cut them in cubes. Arrange the cubes in layers in a buttered baking dish, covering each layer with white sauce II. (see page 29), and grated cheese Sprinkle the top with buttered crumbs, and bake the potatoes for about 20 minutes.
The recipe assumes you already have a standard white sauce and an oven that is already hot from something else. Both need filling in.
- White sauce IIIn this book's graduated scheme, sauce II is presumably the medium one, on the order of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk with salt and pepper; check page 29 rather than relying on this. The recipe states no quantity of potatoes, but about 1 1/2 cups of sauce suits roughly 4 medium ones.
- No temperature givenTwenty minutes only makes sense in a hot oven. Bake at 400F; the potatoes and sauce are already cooked, so the time is for browning the crumbs and heating through.
- Start with cold potatoesBoiled or baked potatoes that have cooled overnight cube cleanly. Hot ones crumble and the dish turns to mash under the sauce.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/4 cup crumbs. Untreated crumbs will scorch in patches rather than brown evenly.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese"; a dry grating cheese such as aged cheddar suits it. About 3/4 cup grated, divided among the layers, with a little held back for the top.
- Season the sauce, not the layersPotatoes absorb a great deal of salt and the recipe adds none directly. Season the white sauce more assertively than you would if serving it alone.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; with about 4 medium potatoes it serves four as a side dish. Use a shallow dish rather than a deep one so more surface browns.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was not sold but given away: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed it to policyholders for much of the first half of the twentieth century, alongside pamphlets on hygiene and child care, as part of the company's broader health-education output. The house style here is brisk to the point of terseness and leans on cross-references like "white sauce II" so that one basic technique, learned once, could carry a dozen dishes. Au gratin in French cooking means finished with a browned crust, and is usually traced to gratter, to scrape -- the crusty scrapings from the dish rather than the cheese; in American usage it commonly came to imply cheese and crumbs. Potatoes in white sauce with cheese were one way of turning yesterday's boiled potatoes into a hot dish, and this section of the book contains similar economies.