Recipes

• 1 kg (2 lbs) peeled potatoes (I used Records and they worked well)
• 90g (3 oz.) Melted Butter
• 1 Tablespoon chopped fresh thyme
• 1 Tablespoon chopped fresh chives
• Plenty of salt and fresh black pepper

Chefs Tip
This is a bit of a flash back to seventies dinner parties but a hell of a good one. It is perfect dinner party food because it is fiddle enough to be fancy and yet will hang about, waiting for guests to be ready to eat without noticeable deterioration.

It is handy if you have a food processor with a slicer, or, an old fashioned mandolin but they are sufficiently forgiving to be done by hand if you haven’t. I cook them in an old cast iron frying pan, with an oven proof handle, which looks good on a table, but a cake tin or quiche tin would do the trick. They don’t always come out of the cooking container easily so it is good to have something you can put on the table and let people help themselves.

The herbs aren’t in the original classic recipe but I like them in it.

Slice the potatoes as evenly and as thinly as you can. If they are very floury it would be worth while giving them a quick rinse in some cold water and a pat dry. Put the sliced potatoes in a bowl, melt the butter and pour this on them then sprinkle over the herbs and the salt and pepper. Now work the butter through the potatoes with your fingers so that the slices are all coated and the herbs and seasonings are well dispersed. Scatter these fairly evenly into your (well buttered) cooking utensil and press them down together. Cover these with tin foil and heat the oven to 200C,400F, Gas 6.

Cook covered at this temperature then take off the cover and cook for a further 15 to 20 minutes uncovered. The top layer should get crusty, the potatoes tender when poked with a knife. It can be handy to cook them up to the uncovering stage earlier in the day and put them into a hot oven to brown for about 20 mts before you eat.

Turn them out on to a plate if you can, otherwise serve in the container.