French Scalloped Potatoes

Today, World Moms Blog has a fun post about how everyone (well, a small chunk of the contributors) met their husbands. My story is there, although most of you know it by now. But you should totally go and read everyone’s story. Love is in the air!  

And now – the awkward segue.

The difference between Scalloped Potatoes and Gratin Dauphinois is that the latter calls for cooking the potatoes in the milk mixture on the stove before putting it in the oven, and the American version has the potatoes boiled briefly first, before cooking it in the milk mixture in the oven.

I just thought you might like to have that mystery dispelled for you.

My recipe is from “The Joy of Cooking” as its base, but I’ve frenchified the sauce to make it more like Gratin Dauphinois. Shall we get started?

Mince a large clove of garlic, and butter a large baking dish with the garlic butter mixture. Like so.

Put a large pot of water to boil, and by the time you peel and slice 3-4 pounds of potatoes (thinly), the water will be just at the point of boiling.

Put the potatoes in for 8 minutes. I put them in for 5 and they were firm – not hard, but not as soft as I like them.

Drain the potatoes and rinse them with cold water.

You should really pat them dry with a couple of paper towels on your cutting block, but I didn’t do that and ended up having to drain the liquid out of the dish later on. Not an elegant chef move – don’t make my mistake.

Chop up an onion. I show two here, but I forgot that the last time I made the dish too oniony and it was not good. One small one is plenty.

Now it’s time to make the “sauce.” Take 1 cup of milk and 2 cups of half & half (which doesn’t exist in France, so I used 1 cup of cream to 2 cups of milk – this might also have contributed to it being watery since the milk was 2%).

Add a heaping ¼ teaspoon of nutmeg.

Add a heaping tablespoon of dijon mustard.

Add a teaspoon of salt.

Then, get out your grated Cheddar and Swiss (or grate it yourself if you didn’t buy it pre-grated, as is so readily available in France, at least for the Swiss). I’ll leave it to you to determine how much.

Now you’re ready for an assembly line.

Put a layer of potatoes, followed by the onions, followed by the Swiss cheese, followed by a teaspoon of flour. (I used gluten-free).

Repeat those steps with everything, except for the onions, until all the potatoes are in the baking dish.  There will be about three layers.

Sprinkle some white pepper to taste, and I added another splash of sea salt over the whole thing for good measure.

Pour the milk sauce over the potatoes,

and cover with grated cheddar cheese.  I used cheddar for this part and it was fab.

Bake, covered, in a pre-heated oven at 375°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

Uncover and bake for 15 more minutes.

Et voila. You obviously won’t make this when you’ve been at the office all day, and are only at home to put the kids in bed and recover your sanity before starting in again the next day. But you might make this to accompany some steak and green beans on a night when you have guests over and you want your house to smell like a restaurant when they arrive. Because it does, with all that butter and garlic.

And I’ll have you know that after serving this for our guests last night, we’re eating vegetables tonight for dinner. Just vegetables. Okay, okay, maybe a little cheese on top, but primarily vegetables.

In case you think I exaggerate a bit with all that cream in the A Lady in France recipes.

Although you would not be wrong.

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