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Recipe for "delmonicos"

NAME

     DELMONICOS - A casserole of potatoes, rice, and cheese
     This recipe has been in my family for 100 years. The  family
     legend  was  that  it  came  from the Delmonico Hotel in New
     York, whose chef, Charles  Ranhofer,  had  given  it  to  my
     great-great  grandfather  under  some  circumstance  in  the
     1880's.  I recently managed to  track  down  a  cookbook  by
     Ranhofer, published in 1893, and alas, it contains no recipe
     that even remotely resembles this one.
     Who knows? Maybe my great-grandmother got it from a  newspa-
     per.  I guess it doesn't matter much. I've watched 4 genera-
     tions in my family grow  fatter  and  happier  eating  these
     potatoes, so who cares where it came from `way back then.

INGREDIENTS (Serves 6)

     1.5 kg    potatoes (12-15 medium potatoes)
     70 g      uncooked white rice
     100 g     butter
     40 g      flour
     750 ml    milk
     5 ml      salt
     2.5 ml    pepper
     1 kg      sharp cheddar cheese

PROCEDURE

          (1)  Boil the potatoes in salted water until  they  are
               cooked  firm,  about  20  or  30 minutes. Let them
               cool, then dice them into 1-cm cubes.
          (2)  Cook the rice in 1 cup of water with 1 ml of salt.
               Cook until soft, about 20 minutes. Drain.
          (3)  Make 750 ml of medium white sauce: heat  the  milk
               in  a  saucepan;  in another saucepan, melt butter
               and brown flour in it. When flour is  brown,  dump
               hot  milk  all  at once into flour/butter mixture.
               Add salt and pepper,  simmer  for  10  minutes  or
               more, stirring frequently.
          (4)  Into the white sauce, stir 200 g of grated cheddar
               and the cooked rice. Mix well.
          (5)  Mix the sauce with the cold  potatoes,  then  pour
               into  a buttered baking dish.  Sprinkle generously
               with 800 g of cheddar. Bake 1 hour at 160 deg. C.
          (6)  Let it cool, and put it in the refrigerator.  Wait
               at least a day. Then reheat and serve.

NOTES

     My grandmother always peeled the potatoes when she made this
     recipe;  I  never  do.  I think that women of her generation
     were taught by their home economics teachers  that  unpeeled
     potatoes were a sign of moral decay.
     The most maddening thing  about  this  recipe  is  how  much
     better  it tastes the second day. There is no reason why you
     can't eat it fresh out of the oven, but if  you  can  muster
     the  will  power  to put it aside after it has cooked and to
     let it wait a day, the flavor will improve dramatically.

RATING

     Difficulty: easy.  Time: 1 hour to prepare, 1 hour to  cook,
     1 day to wait.  Precision: Approximate measurement OK.

CONTRIBUTOR

     Brian Reid
     DEC Western Research Laboratory, Palo Alto CA
     decwrl!reid    -or- reid@decwrl.DEC.COM