HFF 6.2: Breakfast

 

The Challenge: Breakfast. Make a food suitable for breakfast. 

The Recipe: Potatoes à la Maitre d'Hotel  From The American Matron. 

 

                      "A good breakfast dish", and said to be popular in London.

The Date/Year and Region: 1851, Boston 

How Did You Make It: On a wood-burning stove! Which actually ended up being the hardest part, because it was a wet day, and our clammy wood was burning erratically. 

 

I started by peeling 5 russet potatoes, with help from a friend. We set the potatoes on to boil, and (as the fire was very slow), left them on the back of the stove for over an hour, moving them up as the other dishes eventually finished. When the potatoes were soft, they returned to the back of the stove until closer to serving time.

 

Maybe an hour before serving time, we took the potatoes off the stove and I sliced them into rounds (<1/4" thick). I also chopped a generous double-handful of parsley. When a front burner was free and the fire finally going strong, I melted 1.5 Tbsp butter and browned it, then sprinkled on 1 Tbsp flour, stirring constantly to make a brown roux. When this was a nice color, I added 1 cup of broth [cheated and used a beef bouillon cube in water], which promptly started boiling. We gave it a minute to boil while I stirred, which I kept doing as my friend put in the potatoes and parsley, with a generous dash of salt and pepper [~1-2tsp salt, ~1/4-1/2 tsp pepper]. The sauce continued to boil this whole time, and had by then reduced sufficiently, that we pulled it off the heat and let it start to cool. We omitted the egg because the sauce was already quite thick, and there wasn't enough of it to mix the egg in around the potatoes.

Time to Complete: Under 4 hours based on our start and end times. Hard to say exactly how long. It'd estimate 10 minutes to peel the potatoes and getting them in water (less today, since I had help). They boiled while I worked on other projects, and then maybe 20-30 to make the roux and sauce, and stew the potatoes (once the fire was behaving).  It worked fine to cook the potatoes well in advance and let them sit in their water on the back of the stove until we were ready.

Total Cost: $2 or less

How Successful Was It?: Quite. It's tasty, and was popular with the all the volunteers. Despite having a large spread of dishes, all of the potatoes were eaten. I thought the dish tasted very rich and buttery (especially relative to how much butter actually went into it), but the most common comment was that it tasted like scalloped potatoes.

I think the recipe worked well as we made it, and I'm not in a hurry in to change anything. No potato or parsley amounts were given, and the butter was quite subjective. While our quantities worked, I suspect that fewer potatoes per unit liquid would make it easier to add the egg, and also more necessary to use the egg for thickening. It's also possible that the wide dish we used made the liquid cook down faster, as it increased the surface area.

How Accurate Is It?: I omitted the egg at the suggestion of my mentor, as noted. There was so little liquid in the dish relative to the potatoes, that we thought it'd end up as scrambled egg rather than thickening the sauce (which was already a nice consistency just from natural reduction and the potatoes). As noted before, most of the quantities were guesses, but they seemed to work.

Potatoes a la Maitre d'Hotel, or stove-top scalloped potatoes.