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Potatoes Hashed in Cream
Coarsely chop sufficient cold boiled potatoes to measure one pint. Season well with salt and white pepper and put in a saucepan with one cupful of cream. Place at the side of the fire, where they will cook slowly, and shake from time to time until the cream is nearly absorbed; then add one tablespoonful of butter, shake until it is evenly distributed over the potatoes and take at once from the fire and serve.
A four-ingredient dish where the only technique is heat control. Everything depends on cooking the cream down slowly rather than boiling it.
- "At the side of the fire"On a wood or coal range, the cooler edge of the top held a pan at a bare simmer. Use the lowest setting on your smallest burner, or a diffuser. Hard boiling risks the cream separating and leaving the potatoes in greasy curds.
- A pint of potatoesThis is a volume measure of the already-chopped potato, roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound of boiled potatoes, or three medium ones. Boil them ahead and chill them; warm potatoes crumble when chopped.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream, 36% or more. Half-and-half and light cream have too little fat to reduce without separating. Ultra-pasteurized cream is sometimes said to behave less well in reductions than unpasteurized cream would have.
- Shake, do not stirThe recipe specifies shaking. A spoon breaks the potato edges down and thickens the cream with starch; sliding the pan keeps the pieces distinct.
- TimingReckon 10 to 15 minutes for the cream to reduce to a coating glaze. The visual cue is the surface of the pan going almost dry between the potatoes when you tip it.
- Butter lastThe tablespoon of butter goes in at the very end, shaken through the reduced cream before the pan comes off the fire, which gives gloss. Added at the start it simply fries the potatoes.
- White pepperConventionally used so no dark flecks show. Black pepper will do, though it tastes somewhat different and will speck the dish.
- YieldThree to four servings as a side. The recipe insists on serving at once; the dish is at its best straight from the pan.
The dish is built entirely on cold boiled potatoes left from an earlier meal, the kind of economy common in period household cookery. The direction to set a pan at "the side of the fire" for slow work is a phrase found in cookbooks of the period, and it persisted in print after gas ranges began displacing the coal stove it described.