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Creamed Potatoes
2 cups milk 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 3 cups diced, cooked potatoes (boiled or baked) 1 teaspoon onion juice (optional) To make the sauce, put the Mazola in a saucepan, add the cornstarch and seasonings and gradually stir in the milk. When boiling, add the potatoes and onion juice. Cook slowly until the potatoes have absorbed part of the sauce.
A cornstarch-thickened white sauce rather than a roux-based one, which is the whole point of this book — it belongs to a Corn Products Refining Company promotional booklet selling Mazola oil and Argo cornstarch. It works, but cornstarch behaves differently from flour and needs handling accordingly.
- The hinge: mix the starch off the heatCornstarch has no fat-absorbing bulk the way flour does, so stirring it into oil mostly just wets it. Combine oil, starch and seasonings into a smooth slurry, then add the milk gradually with the pan off or barely warm; lumps formed at this stage are difficult to smooth out later. The recipe itself does not specify heat at this point.
- Bring it to a full boil, then stopCornstarch reaches full thickening power only at the boil, so "when boiling" is not optional. But prolonged boiling or vigorous stirring afterward breaks the gel down and the sauce thins again. One minute of gentle bubbling is enough.
- MazolaCorn oil, still sold under the same name. Any neutral oil works; butter gives a better flavor here and about the same body.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchBoth were Corn Products brands and both are ordinary cornstarch. Two tablespoons to two cups of milk is on the thick side for a pouring sauce, since cornstarch thickens more per spoonful than flour, and it will thicken further as the potatoes absorb part of it.
- Onion juicePeriod shorthand for the liquid pressed or grated from a raw onion — grate half an onion on a fine rasp and use the juice, discarding the pulp. Marked optional in the original, but it is most of what keeps the dish from tasting flat.
- "Cook slowly"Low heat. The recipe gives no time; a few minutes is enough for the potatoes to take up part of the sauce. Stir sparingly and with a folding motion, since cooked potato dice fall apart quickly and their starch will make the sauce pasty.
- PotatoesCold leftover boiled or baked potatoes are what this is for, and firmer waxy potatoes hold their shape better than baking varieties. Three cups is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb cooked.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest roughly four to six as a breakfast side. Salt at the end as well as the beginning — potatoes absorb a great deal of it.
This comes from a manufacturer's cookbook, the kind of booklet the Corn Products Refining Company distributed to teach American cooks to reach for Mazola and Argo instead of butter and flour. The branded names appear both in the ingredient list and in the method, but the sauce itself is a conventional béchamel with cornstarch swapped in for the roux. Creamed potatoes were often breakfast food in this period, one way of using yesterday's boiled potatoes, and a hot starchy dish alongside eggs or fried meat was a common shape of a substantial American morning meal. The cornstarch route also had an advantage the booklet does not spell out — it needs no cooking-out of raw flour taste, so the sauce comes together in a few minutes on a busy stove.