12 potatoes, parboiled, and when cold, sliced, or cut into dice.

1 onion, chopped.

Butter or dripping for frying.

Chopped parsley, pepper and salt.

Heat the butter in a frying-pan; put in the onion; fry one minute; then the potatoes. Stir briskly and fry slowly five minutes. There should be butter enough to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pan; and they should not brown. Add the seasoning just before you take them up. Drain perfectly dry by shaking them to and fro in a heated cullender. Serve in a hot dish.

Stewed Potatoes. Maltese cross

12 fine potatoes.

1 egg, beaten light.

1 great spoonful of butter.

1 table-spoonful flour, wet with cold milk.

1 cup of milk.

Chopped parsley, salt and pepper.

Peel and lay the potatoes in cold water for half an hour. Then slice or cut into dice into more cold water, just enough to cover them. Boil gently in this until tender; but not until they are a paste. Drain off nearly all the water; put pepper, salt, and the milk in with the potatoes left in the saucepan, and heat again to boiling before stirring in the flour. Cook two minutes, stirring up from the bottom to prevent scorching; add the egg, parsley and butter, and pour into a covered dish.

Fried Potatoes. Maltese cross

12 potatoes.

Butter or dripping for frying.

Salt to taste.

Peel the potatoes; cut from end to end in even strips, by first halving, then quartering each; cutting into eighths, and if the potato be large, into sixteenths. The more regular the shape and uniform the size the better the dish will look. Lay these in cold—ice-water if you have it—for at least half an hour; then upon a dry cloth, covering with another and patting the upper gently to dry each piece. The butter or dripping should be boiling hot. Fry the potatoes briskly, turning as the lower side is done to a yellow-brown. As you take them out of the fat—which should be done the instant they are of the right color—put into a hot cullender set over a plate in the open oven, and sprinkle with salt. Serve in a napkin laid within a hot dish and folded lightly over them. A dish-cover would make them “soggy,” whereas they should be crisp.

Scalloped Potatoes.

3 cups mashed potatoes.

3 table-spoonfuls cream.

2 table-spoonfuls butter.

Salt and pepper.

Yolks of four hard-boiled eggs.

1 raw egg, beaten well.

Handful dry, fine bread-crumbs.

Beat up the potatoes while hot, with the cream, butter and raw egg, seasoning well. Put a layer in the bottom of a buttered baking-dish; cover this with thin slices of yolk, salt and pepper; then another layer of potato, and so on, until all the materials are used up. The top layer should be potato. Strew bread-crumbs thickly over this. Bake covered until hot through, then brown quickly. Serve in the baking-dish.

Potatoes À l’Italienne. (Extremely nice.) Maltese cross

Enough mealy potatoes to make a good dish, boiled dry.

2 table-spoonfuls of cream.

1 table-spoonful of butter.

Salt and pepper.

2 eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately.

Whip up the potatoes, while hot, with a silver fork, instead of using the potato-beetle. This is, by the way, a much better method of mashing potato than that usually adopted. The potato is dried of all superfluous moisture, made whiter and lighter than by pounding. When it is fine and mealy, beat in the cream, the butter, salt, pepper, and whip up to a creamy heap before mixing in, with few dexterous strokes, the whites, which should be first whipped stiff. Pile irregularly upon a buttered pie-dish; brown quickly in the oven; slip carefully, with the help of a cake-turner, to a heated flat dish, and send up.

Potatoes À la Duchesse. Maltese cross

When you cook potatoes À l’Italienne prepare more than will be needed for one day. Cut the remnants, when perfectly cold, into squares or rounds with a cake-cutter, wet in cold water. Grease the bottom of a baking-pan and set these in it in rows, but not touching one another, and bake quickly, brushing them all over, except, of course, on the bottom, with beaten egg when they begin to brown. Lay a napkin, folded, upon a hot dish, and range these regularly upon it.

They are very fine, and considered quite a fancy dish.

Potato Eggs. Maltese cross

2 cups cold (or hot) mashed potato.

¾ cup of cold ham, minced very fine.

2 eggs, beaten light.

1 table-spoonful melted butter.

2 table-spoonfuls cream or rich milk.

Pepper and salt, and dripping for frying.

1 cup good gravy.

Work the butter into the potato, the cream, seasoning, and, when the mixture is free from lumps, the beaten eggs. Beat all up light before the ham goes in. Flour your hands; make this paste into egg-shaped balls; roll these in flour and fry in good dripping; turning them carefully, not to spoil the shape. Pile upon a flat dish, and pour some good gravy, hot, over them.

If you have nothing else of which gravy can be made, boil the ham-bone or a few slices of ham in a little water; thicken with flour; add a little butter, parsley, pepper and a beaten egg; boil up until it thickens.

The above is a simple, but very good preparation of potato. You will not grudge the little additional time and trouble required to make pretty and palatable the remnants of ham and potato, that, served plain, would tempt no one except a very hungry man.

For many other ways of cooking this invaluable vegetable, for breakfast and luncheon, as well as for dinner, the reader is referred to the section—“Potatoes,” in “Common Sense in the Household,” page 210.