Gratin Dauphinois

"I have made a great deal of gratins in my lifetime, following many different recipes many times over, and I can tell you that they never turn out the same. "

Darina Kopcok - Gratinée

A sentiment with which I heartily concur.

We had lunch with friends a day or so ago, and they served a most wonderful Gratin Dauphinois. Now I am a potato freak and Gratin Dauphinois is one of my favourite ways of cooking them. However, like my fellow blogger of Gratinée, my versions never turn out the same - even if I use roughly the same method every time. Though it's always tasty.

It's an absolutely classic dish and one of those that I set my mind to master when I first started trying to reproduce the food I ate in France. This dish was introduced to me by the wonderful Madame Perruque in the Jura, and I think the version my friends served is perhaps the closest to what I remember so far. I think they said it was Stephanie Alexander's recipe, so I shall give it at the end. The picture is Elizabeth David's version.

The Dauphiné is an Alpine region of France. It was part of the crown prince's domain which is how he came to be referred to as the Dauphin. A bit like the Prince of Wales. Potatoes, of course are grown all over France and every region has its own potato dish, but the Dauphiné is famous for its cream and cheese (as is Normandy - so not sure what the Normans do with their potatoes - another time). Mind you this is where we get the argument. For argument there is, as there always is with any classical dish. These are the points of dispute:

- waxy or floury potatoes

- cream, or milk, or a mix, or milk and egg beaten together

- cheese?

- garlic - any at all, how much?, rubbed around the dish, crushed into the mix, cooked with the potatoes - this is endless

- how thick do you slice the potatoes? - the general opinion seems to be thin and use a mandoline, though this is dangerous as one cook noted - and our hosts also had a damaged finger from using one

- do you cook the potatoes first? - in water, in milk?

- do you soak the potatoes first to get rid of the starch? - there is fairly violent dispute over this

- nutmeg?

- how long do you cook it? I saw one recipe that said four hours!

flour?

There are three basic ingredients - potatoes, milk or cream and butter and two optional extras - cheese and garlic. It's amazing all the different things you can do with just these. The best summary, as always, is Felicity Cloake on the Guardian's website, so if you want to learn all about it check it out. I thought I had first learnt to make it from Jane Grigson and that she had recommended the milk and egg mix for the liquid - it was still a time of relative scarcity and cream was a real luxury - but no her recipe uses cream. So I now think I may have learnt from a little book I bought in France La Cuisine pour Tous - which has just about every French dish you could want and all of them in recipes of just a few lines long. I should check it out more. All of my sources have a variant on the above possibilities, so it's obviously impossible to say what is 'authentic' and what is not and anyway does it matter? Suffice to say that any French cookbook has a version.

Anyway here is the Stephanie version, which is what I think we were served. This is a no cheese version.

8 waxy potatoes, peeled, 40g butter, 2 cloves garlic, very thinly sliced, salt, freshly-ground black pepper, freshly grated nutmeg (optional), 1 teaspoon plain flour, 200ml cream, 400ml boiling milk

Preheat oven to 200ºC. Slice potatoes thinly (but not too thinly). Using half the butter, grease a gratin dish. Arrange potato in overlapping rows, seasoning as you go with garlic, salt, pepper and nutmeg (if desired). Mix flour into cream, then add a little of the milk and stir. Add remaining milk and mix well. Pour over gratin evenly and carefully, so that potato is not disturbed, and dot with remaining butter. Bake for 1 hour. If the gratin seems to be browning too quickly, put it lower down in the oven or cover it with foil, or both.

I must try it sometime. For myself, for years I economically used the milk and egg mix, now I tend to use a mix of cream and milk. I always rub the bowl with garlic and I do put cheese on top. I slice the potatoes by hand, so they're probably not as thin as they should be. The type of potatoes depends on what I have. I generally forget about the nutmeg, but it does make a difference when you use it.

"I will tell you what I love about the French. Only they have a word for the golden, crispy bits of food that get stuck around the edges of a baking dish. This word, gratin, comes from the verb gratter, which means “to scrape”. Gratinée is from the transitive verb form of the word for “crust”." Darina Kopcok - Gratinée

Of course you can make a gratin out of just about any kind of vegetable - Donna Hay's version in her Modern Classics book is made with sweet potatoes which are trendier than good old potatoes - and quite nice, but not as nice as actual potatoes. She also adds a bit of sage, but otherwise it's pretty much the classic version. And the liquid doesn't have to be cream or milk, it can be anything else you care to think of really. So yes give it a go. Classics are classics for a reason you know.