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Potatoes, Pilgrim Style
(A Trappist recipe.) Boil and slice 6 large potatoes; make a frying batter of 1 cup of milk, 1 egg, beaten, 4 tablespoonfuls of flour, and some parsley, adding 4 sliced onions, fried in butter. Stir these, add the potatoes, and barely enough milk to cover, also some chopped parsley, a little nutmeg, and plenty of bread-crumbs on top of the dish. Bake until brown.
POTATOES (as cooked in Mantua.).
Beat 2 cups of freshly mashed potatoes with 1 cup of white stock, the yolks of 2 eggs, and a tablespoonful of cream or butter, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Pour into a shallow dish, smooth the top, and cover closely with grated Parmesan cheese. Bake 1/2 hour, until brown.
POTATOES (as cooked in Flanders.).
Boil and slice 4 large potatoes, and add a tablespoonful of chopped onion, as much parsley, pepper, salt, and 1/2 cup of rich milk. Stir and pour into a dish, cover with the yolk of an egg, mixed with 1/2 cup of bread-crumbs. Bake until brown.
BAKED TOMATOES (as cooked in Sicily.).
Take out the centres from 6 large tomatoes, put these centres with 2 tablespoonfuls of butter or olive oil, 1 onion, and a bit of bacon chopped fine, some parsley, salt, pepper, and a clove pounded, also a tablespoonful of sherry or any white wine. Cook this, add 1/2 cup of bread-crumbs or enough to fill the tomatoes, dust with bread-crumbs and grated cheese, and bake 1/2 hour. Serve with a white sauce.
Four related potato-and-tomato gratins run together on one page; each is essentially sliced or mashed vegetable bound with milk or egg and browned under crumbs or cheese. None of the four gives an oven temperature, and only two give a time.
- Oven settingNo temperature is given for any of the four. A moderate oven, around 375F, will brown crumbs and cheese in roughly 25-35 minutes without curdling the milk or egg binding; the Mantua and Sicily versions specify half an hour, which is consistent with that.
- The "frying batter" is not a batterIn the Pilgrim Style recipe the milk, egg and flour are a binder, not a coating. Whisk them smooth before the fried onions go in, or the flour will set in lumps around the potato slices.
- Barely enough milk to coverThis is the hinge of the first recipe. The liquid should come just to the top of the potato slices and no further; any more and the flour cannot thicken it and you get a soupy dish under a browned crust.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted. Ordinary light chicken stock is the closest substitute; a well-salted commercial broth will need the added salt cut back.
- Parmesan cover"Cover closely" means an unbroken layer; no quantity is given, but something on the order of three-quarters of a cup to a cup of grated cheese will blanket a shallow dish of two cups of potato. Freshly grated browns and stays supple; pre-grated powder tends to go sandy.
- Egg yolk as a glazeIn the Flanders version the yolk is meant to be stirred into the crumbs to make a paste that gilds as it bakes. Loosen it with a spoonful of milk first so it spreads.
- Tomato shellsSalt the hollowed tomatoes and drain them cut-side down for ten minutes before filling, otherwise the crumb stuffing turns to slurry. Bake them in a dish that holds them upright and close together.
- YieldSix potatoes or six tomatoes serve four to six as a side; the Mantua dish, built on two cups of mashed potato, serves four.
The label "Trappist recipe" points to the kitchens of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, whose rule historically excluded meat and leaned on dairy, eggs, bread and root vegetables — exactly the register of this dish, where fried onion, nutmeg and a milk-and-egg binding do the work that bacon or stock would do elsewhere. The page as a whole shows the habit of the turn-of-the-century travel cookbook: a single vegetable is worked through a set of national or regional variations — Mantua, Flanders, Sicily — each distinguished by one gesture, Parmesan in the first, egg-gilded crumbs in the second, wine and clove in the third. Potatoes had been fully naturalised in northern European cooking for a century by then, and the gratin form, vegetable moistened with milk or stock and browned under crumbs, was the standard way to bring a boiled potato back to the table with dignity. As for the Sicilian tomatoes, stuffed and baked tomatoes are generally traced to southern Italian and Provençal practice before they became a fixture of English and American cookbooks.