potluck dish | Funny about Money

Sooo…. The instant the sign-up sheet for the end-of-year choir party surfaced, I shot over like a rocket to get my name in first, so as not to be cut off at the pass in my quest to volunteer to bring my favorite amazingly cheap but amazingly delicious dish, potatoes au gratin.

Never sign up for anything when you’re distracted by ambition. My beady little eyes were so blinded by the glory of getting there first that I neglected to consider the venue. This shindig is not taking place at the church, which has a kitchen (two of them, actually) with enough refrigerator space to accommodate the 11th armored division’s mobile mess hall. It’s happening at the choir director’s house.

{sigh} What was I to do with a bubbling, 350-degree panful of potatoes, sauce, and cheese for the two hours in which we are to rehearse and perform before the party starts?

Couldn’t easily take it with me. It would have to be cooked in the church kitchen, which would mean it would be overcooked, since the period between the time we process up the aisle and the time the last note soars out of the organ is over an hour. Also, it would be wildly hot: getting a pan of searing hot potatoes from the stove to my car through a mob of people and from my car to the choir director’s house would be a challenge…to say nothing of figuring out how to keep the pan from melting the synthetic rugs in my car.

Having chewed on this dilemma for a week, I’d about decided to punt with potato salad. Then I flipped open my ancient Beard’s American Cookery, and what should I find but M. Blot’s Recipe for au Gratin Potatoes. This little gem uses precooked potatoes. Not only that, but it turns out to be very easy to prepare—much easier than the traditional lasagna-like layering of potatoes, butter, béchamel sauce, cheese, and crumbs.

And it takes ten minutes flat to warm in a 400-degree oven.

E-mail to the boss: OK to use your oven to heat this thing? Boss to underling: Nooo problem—we have all our ovens at the choir’s disposal.

Though I haven’t tasted this yet, obviously (because the party’s tomorrow), I did prepare it this morning, and it looks delicious. The sauce is splendidly savory.

Here’s my adaptation, enlarged for a crowd:

You need:

6 or 8 boiling potatoes
2 cups milk or 1½ cup milk and ½ cup heavy cream
4 Tbsp butter
4 Tbsp flour
4 egg yolks, beaten
cayenne pepper
salt & pepper to taste
a cup or so of shredded cheddar or Gruyère cheese (I combined Irish cheddar with Jarlsburg)
more butter to oil the pan
buttered breadcrumbs

Wash the potatoes but don’t bother to peel them. Bring a big kettle of water to the boil and place the potatoes in it. Cook over medium-high heat until a knife blade can be inserted easily into one of the larger potatoes.

Meanwhile, grate the cheese and beat the four egg yolks.

When the potatoes are done, drain them in a colander. Allow to cool for a few minutes. At this point, the peels will slip right off—so, when the potatoes are cool enough to touch, remove these with your hands and then slice the potatoes fairly thickly.

Butter an oblong baking dish.

Next, make the béchamel sauce.

How to make the béchamel:

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook gently, stirring, until the butter foams. Add the milk (or milk + cream) and heat over medium-high heat, stirring frequently and watching, until the sauce thickens. Flavor to taste with cayenne, salt, and pepper. Remove the pan from the heat. With the pan off the heat, stir in the beaten egg yolks.

Now add the grated cheese to the hot sauce and stir well to blend.

All that remains to do is to arrange a layer of about half the sliced, cooked potatoes over the bottom of the baking pan. Spread half of the béchamel-cheese sauce over these, and then layer the rest of the potatoes atop that. Spread the rest of the sauce over the second layer. Finally, top it with buttered bread crumbs.

To cook: heat in a 400-degree oven about ten minutes or until heated through.

Since I expect there’ll be little room in the fridge at 9:00 a.m. and I don’t want anyone stacking stuff on top of the tinfoil-covered pan, I’ll wrap it in a big plastic bag with several of those cold brick-shaped things, frozen solid. That should keep it cool until it goes in the oven at 11:00.

Voilà! A scrumptious dish guaranteed to turn the best of church ladies green with envy, hand-made by you with almost no hassle.

Yum!

So there was that scheme to cook up a mess of scalloped potatoes in the crockpot, so as to simplify my contribution to the Christmas Eve potluck down at the Cult Headquarters. Alerted by Frugal Scholar to the likelihood that milk and cheese would curdle during the long cook, I sent out intelligence feelers across the Web. One, count her, (1), authoritative writer offered a true scalloped potato recipe, complete with white sauce and cheese, and claimed it worked well. Everyone else said if you put dairy in a crockpot you’ll end up with curds and whey.

Well, I liked Stephanie O’Dea’s basic idea, which she billed as au gratin rather than scalloped and to which she added walnuts and sage. I happen to have a sage plant that’s struggling to survive the winter frosts and a bucket of Costco walnuts in the freezer. But given the wackiness of the Christmas schedule, I really didn’t want to take a chance on ruining several pounds of potatoes and being left at the last minute with nothing to take to the chivaree.

So… I decided to substitute a velouté sauce—in effect, a white sauce made with chicken stock instead of milk—and then add the gruyère topping at the last minute. This worked pretty well. Here’s how it fell out:

To make enough to choke a horse:

• several pounds of potatoes, peeled
• about four handfuls of walnuts
• four to six fresh sage leaves, minced or finely chopped
• one large yellow onion
• butter in abundance
• olive oil
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 2 cups flavorful chicken stock
• salt and pepper
• a cup or more of grated gruyère (or other) cheese

I happened to have a box of College Inn’s “White Wine and Herbs Culinary Broth,” according to the ingredients panel your basic chicken stock with wine added. It tastes more like they used sherry—their “wine” must be cheap and sweet—but it’s pretty good. But you could use just about any broth, fresh or canned, wine-spiked or not.

Slice the potatoes and onions fairly thin—I used a mandoline for both, creating potato slices about 1/8 inch thick, but if you used a knife, about 1/4 inch would be fine.

Skim a frying pan with olive oil and sauté the onions until they’re just starting to carmelize. In a small frying pan or wide stockpot, melt some butter and toast the walnuts. When the onions are beginning to brown, add the sage and stir to mix well.

Make the sauce velouté: melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a saucepan. Add a like amount of flour. Stir over medium heat until the butter foams, but do not allow to brown. Add the chicken stock and heat over medium high heat, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens.

Generously butter the crockpot’s ceramic pot. Starting with potatoes, layer in the ingredients this order: potatoes on the bottom, dabs of butter, another layer of potatoes, layer of onion/sage, half the toasted walnuts, half the sauce; layer of potatoes, dabs of butter, layer of potatoes, remaining walnuts, layer of onion/sage, remaining potatoes, remaining sauce.

Cook on “low” about 5 or 6 hours.

A half-hour before serving, remove the cover, sprinkle the gruyère over the top, and replace the cover. Allow to cook until the cheese melts.

Ours cooked about six hours. I think that may have been a bit too long for Idahos, because the result, while extremely tasty, was somewhat mushy. Next time, I’d use boiling potatoes (red or white), which should hold their shape a bit better. Stephanie’s recipe calls for cooking the dish on “high” for just three hours; this also might solve the overcooking issue.

I’m fairly certain that you could get away with pouring a cup or so of heavy cream over the top at the time you put in the cheese—about a half-hour before serving. Even though the potatoes are very hot by then, I very much doubt the cream would fall apart in a half-hour. But since I had to sing at the 8:30 service as well as the midnight eucharist, SDXB would be bringing the potful of potatoes to the intermission potluck; setting him to experimenting with cream minutes before he had to haul the stuff to the car…well, that would’ve been asking for trouble.

Although it wasn’t a pretty dish, it really tasted very good, and the diners left little to bring home.

The Ultimate Church Potluck Dish

How the Crockpot Scalloped Potatoes Worked Out