My favourite decadent, cheesy potato dish
And other yummy spud ideas to bring comfort and joy in the cold
I’d already started working on this week’s spud-centric newsletter when I began to spot paeans to potatoes everywhere. During the week, Felicity Cloake rounded up an excellent selection of potato recipes from the Guardian’s collection (including one of mine, for crisp and salty potato scallops) in the Feast newsletter. (I recommending signing up to this so it drops into your In Tray each week. Cloake, Rachel Roddy, Yotam Ottolenghi and Ravinder Bhogal take it in turns to write the missives, all lovely reads and hugely useful when stuck for meal inspiration.)
Also this week, Americans reportedly went mad for British-style jacket potatoes, thanks to an influencer on TikTok whose tips on how to get them right turned them into a ‘viral sensation’. Diana Henry (unwittingly) proved the point that jackets are, indeed, worth going doollally for, by offering three divine versions in her Telegraph column on Saturday. (I’m keen to try the Mushroom Stroganoff ones). Meanwhile, The Express newspaper offered readers the Poppy Cooks method to make perfect, smooth mashed potato.
This united focus on tubers makes perfect sense. The bitterly cold and gloomy weather continues here in the UK and potatoes truly, truly are the best remedy. They’re comforting, of course; they’re a staple in traditional home cooking, and therefore we associate them with family and nurturing. They’re also satisfying while asking little of our palates, and apparently they boost serotonin levels thereby making us happy.
Rachel Roddy pointed out in a recent Guardian column that there’s nary a dish that can’t be improved by the addition of a small potato. Mostly obviously, thick soups and stews benefit because taters collapse as they cook, releasing their starchy goodness, which serves to thicken and enrich. Roddy further confirms that, “ring cake, torta caprese, pizza dough, focaccia, muffins, shortbread, chocolate pudding and yorkshire pudding all benefit from the addition of a small boiled and mashed potato.”
One can’t deny the allure of crispy potatoes, ergo, chips, potato scallops, and the Quality Chophouse’s legendary (and widely copied) confit potatoes. But if I had to choose my favourite spud dish, it would have to be decadently creamy and rich gratin dauphinois - essentially thinly sliced spuds baked in cream/milk, sometimes cheese and a whisper of garlic.
Although I disagree with him, I do take the point of food writer Ed Smith, who finds gratin dauphinois “too rich, filling and creamy”. He prefers the lighter boulangère potatoes, which are similarly sliced and baked, but with onions in the mix and good stock instead of cream. He offers a terrific recipe for them in his excellent book, On The Side, and thinking about boulangère spuds reminds me of my favourite way of enjoying them: with those posh confit duck legs you buy in a tin. Bake your boulangère potatoes until there are 20 minutes left to cook them, take them out of the oven, nestle the duck legs on top, and pop them back in. In the remaining cooking time the potatoes will finish cooking and the duck legs will heat through, crisp up, and release their delicious ducky juices into the potatoes underneath. Divine.
But to me, gratin dauphinois - and variations thereof - is the apogee of all spud recipes; it’s creamy, carby, rich and utterly delicious. I’m super keen to try an intriguing
dish, Dopiaza dauphinoise with za’atar, in his book Mother Tongue (I’ve only just - belatedly - bought it, and it’s terrific). It combines a traditional gratin dauphinois approach, but with the addition of lots of onions, fragrant za’atar and spices from its curry house namesake. Definitely on my list.
There are, in fact, numerous riffs on gratin dauphinois - some recipes have no cheese in them, others include eggs as well as cheese; bacon or smoked ham find their way into certain recipes, and sometimes the cream is infused with an abundance of finely chopped fresh herbs. Where cheese is included, most often it’s Gruyère, but in this week’s recipe I offer you a version I’ve adapted from one by Patricia Wells in her book Bistro Cooking. The dish hails from the Auvergne region of France and is one for lovers of blue cheese. If you don’t happen to fall into that happy group, you could use a soft rindless goat’s cheese instead. Honestly, your kitchen will smell incredible while it bakes. Here it is.