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Scalloped Cold Boiled Potatoes
Cold boiled potatoes cut in dice, sliced, or hashed and put in a baking dish and seasoned with rich milk or cream and very little butter, white pepper and salt, a tablespoonful of onions may be added, then sprinkle fine bread crumbs over them and cook in a moderate oven until the mixture is well heated and the crumbs are brown.
A leftovers dish with no quantities at all, which is the point: it scales to whatever cold potatoes you have. A few numbers make it repeatable.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually reckoned at about 350F (sources give roughly 350-375F).
- Proportions to start fromFor about 1 1/2 lb of cold boiled potatoes (roughly 4 medium), use 3/4 to 1 cup of cream or whole milk, 1 tablespoon butter, and 1/2 cup fine dry crumbs. The liquid should come partway up the potatoes, not cover them.
- "Rich milk"Nineteenth-century household milk was unhomogenised and often skimmed only partly, so "rich milk" sits somewhere near today's whole milk with a splash of cream. Half-and-half is the closest single substitute.
- White pepper is deliberateIt seasons without leaving black specks in a pale dish. Black pepper works, though it does not taste quite the same; it also looks different.
- The onionA tablespoon of raw onion may not soften fully in the time the potatoes take to heat through. Sweating it in the butter first is one way round this.
- TimingBecause everything is already cooked, this is a reheating job: 25 to 30 minutes at 350F, uncovered, is usually enough for a dish 2 inches deep. Longer only dries it out.
- Which potatoesWaxy boiled potatoes hold their dice; floury ones collapse into something closer to a gratin. Both are acceptable outcomes, but choose knowingly.
- YieldThe quantities above serve four as a side dish.
Scalloped potatoes in American cookbooks of this period mean potatoes baked in milk under crumbs, and the word "scallop" is generally traced to the shell itself: earlier English cookery baked minced meat and fish "in scallop shells" the same way. What distinguishes this version is that it begins with potatoes already boiled, which places it in the economy of leftovers, where cold boiled potatoes were a daily fact. It reflects how such books were organised around menus rather than ingredients: a plain starch to set beside roast birds, whose own sauces and gravies were expected to do the seasoning. The absence of measurements is typical of the genre, which assumed a cook who judged by eye and was told only the order of operations.