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Scalloped Potatoes
Pare and slice the potatoes of a uniform thickness. Butter a baking dish and fill three-quarters full with the potatoes. Add new milk, seasoned to taste with salt and white pepper, and a little butter, then sprinkle bread crumbs over them and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour, or until the potatoes are cooked and the crumbs browned.
A plain gratin with no measurements at all, which is typical of the period: the dish is defined by proportions you judge by eye. The two things worth getting right are slice thickness and how far the milk comes up.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour is optimistic for raw potatoes at that heat unless the slices are very thin; expect 45 to 60 minutes for 1/8-inch slices, covered for the first half if the top is browning ahead of the middle.
- Uniform thickness mattersThis is the hinge. Unevenly cut slices give you scorched edges and raw centres in the same dish, since there is no pre-cooking step to even things out. A mandoline or the slicing blade of a food processor is the easy answer.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, not skimmed or soured. Whole milk is the closest substitute. It can break or curdle in a long bake; half milk and half cream, or scalding the milk first, guards against that.
- How much milkPour in enough to come just level with the top layer of potatoes, not to cover them. The starch thickens it as it bakes; too much and you get soup under the crumbs.
- White pepperProbably chosen so black flecks would not show in a pale dish. Black pepper will do, though it tastes noticeably sharper and less musty than white.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the fine sandy commercial sort. Toss them with a little melted butter so they brown instead of drying out.
- QuantityAbout 2 lb of potatoes fills a 9-inch dish three-quarters full and serves four to six as a side.
- Potato choiceA starchy or all-purpose potato such as russet or Yukon Gold thickens the milk properly. Waxy salad potatoes stay in distinct slices and leave the liquid thin.
Scalloping, in nineteenth-century American usage, simply meant baking something in a dish with milk or sauce under a crumb topping, and the same treatment was applied to oysters, tomatoes, fish and cabbage. The word is generally traced to "escallop", from cooking and serving in shells, though by the time this book was printed it had come to mean the baking dish and the crumbs rather than any shell.