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Escalloped Potatoes with Cheese
1 quart sliced, cooked potatoes 1/4 teaspoon paprika 3 tablespoons Mazola 3 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3/4 teaspoon salt Few grains mustard 2½ cups milk 1½ cups strong dairy cheese put through food chopper Make a sauce of the Mazola, cornstarch, seasonings and milk. When boiling, add the cheese and stir till dissolved. Oil a baking dish with Mazola, put in the potatoes and cheese sauce mixed, cover with bread crumbs moistened with Mazola, and bake from thirty-five to forty minutes in a moderate oven.
A cornstarch-bound cheese sauce over already-cooked potatoes, from a cookbook published to promote the products named in the ingredient list. The measurements translate cleanly; the technique needs one correction.
- The hinge: don't boil the cheeseBring the milk-and-cornstarch sauce to a full boil first — cornstarch needs it to thicken and to lose its raw taste — then pull the pan off the heat before stirring in the cheese. Cheese held at a boil turns grainy and weeps oil, and a cornstarch sauce gives you no roux to hide behind.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral oil works; three tablespoons of butter will taste better in the sauce and in the crumbs, though the sauce will be slightly looser.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchPlain cornstarch. Slake the three tablespoons in a little of the cold milk before adding the rest, or you will be picking out lumps.
- Strong dairy cheese, put through food chopperA sharp aged cheddar. "Dairy cheese" was a common American term for farmhouse cheddar-type cheese. The food chopper is a hand-cranked grinder; the box grater does the same job, and 1 1/2 cups grated is roughly 5 to 6 oz.
- Few grains mustardA pinch of dry mustard powder, about 1/8 teaspoon. It sharpens the cheese rather than tasting of mustard.
- A quart of sliced cooked potatoesMeasured by volume after slicing: about 1 1/2 to 2 lb of potatoes, boiled whole in their skins the day before and sliced cold so they hold their shape. Waxy or all-purpose potatoes slice better than baking potatoes.
- Moderate oven350F. Nothing here is raw, so the 35 to 40 minutes is about setting the sauce and browning the crumb topping; if the crumbs colour early, lay foil over loosely.
- YieldA 2-quart dish, serving four as a supper on its own or six alongside ham or cold meat.
This comes from one of the branded cookbooks issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, which owned Mazola corn oil and both the Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch labels — hence a recipe in which two ingredients are named by trademark. Such books were given away or sold for a few cents through the early twentieth century, and their real argument is technical: that corn oil and cornstarch can do the work of butter and flour in a white sauce. Escalloped potatoes themselves are far older; the cookery sense of "scallop" is usually explained as food baked in a shallow dish with sauce and crumbs, though the word has also long been connected with cooking in scallop shells. American cookbooks had been printing versions for decades before this one. What dates the page is the assumption that a cook had boiled potatoes left over and a hand-cranked food chopper clamped to the table.