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Sauce for Potatoes Creamed
Creamed Potatoes. For one pint of potatoes freshly boiled, make a white sauce of one cupful of cream; onehalf cupful of flour, two tablespoonfuls of butter, one teaspoonful of chopped parsley and salt and paprika to taste. Melt the butter in the pan, add the flour, and cook and stir until smooth and well cooked. When it stops bubbling and you are afraid it will brown, it is done. Add a little milk, and when it is smooth, the cream. As soon as the sauce begins to thicken, add the potatoes. Do not stir them. When they are heated through, add the seasoning and serve at once. All milk or a smaller proportion of cream can be used.
A plain cream sauce for boiled potatoes, written when cooks measured vegetables by volume rather than weight. One proportion in it needs adjusting before you start.
- The flour is out of proportionHalf a cup of flour to one cup of cream and two tablespoons of butter will produce paste, not sauce. A standard white sauce of this era uses equal parts butter and flour by volume: two tablespoons of each per cup of liquid. Treat the half cup as a printer's error and use two tablespoons.
- A pint of potatoesPotatoes were commonly measured by the pint or quart when diced in cookbooks of this period. A pint of cooked, cubed potato works out at somewhere between three-quarters of a pound and a pound raw, or roughly three medium potatoes. Serves three or four as a side.
- The roux cue"When it stops bubbling and you are afraid it will brown, it is done" is a genuinely useful test. The foaming subsides as the water cooks out of the butter and the raw flour taste goes with it; that takes two to three minutes over moderate heat.
- Add liquid warm and in stagesAdd liquid in stages -- The instruction to add a little milk first, smooth it, then the cream is deliberate. A small amount of liquid into hot roux disperses the starch without lumps; dumping in a full cup at once does not.
- Do not stir the potatoesThis is the hinge. Freshly boiled potatoes break up easily if they are stirred about in hot sauce. Shake the pan or leave it alone until they are heated through.
- PaprikaIn American kitchens of this period paprika would generally have meant the sweet Hungarian kind, used as much for the colour on a pale sauce as for flavour. Modern smoked paprika is a different seasoning and will dominate the dish.
- Cream and milkThe recipe's own note holds: all milk works, though the sauce will be thinner and less glossy. Modern heavy cream is likely richer than the ordinary table cream the recipe assumes, so half cream and half whole milk may be closer to the original.
Creamed vegetables were a staple of the American middle-class table around 1900, and the technique here — butter and flour cooked to a blond roux, then milk or cream — is the sauce that Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries taught as the foundation on which dozens of dishes were built. Paprika as a seasoning rather than a garnish was still relatively uncommon in English-language cookbooks of the period, arriving through Hungarian cooking and Austro-Hungarian immigration.