Erdäpfelgratin

Erdäpfel. That's what Austrians call potatoes. Earth apples. Gretel always used the word, never 'Kartoffeln,' because Kartoffeln is what they say in Germany and this is not German cooking. In my grandmother Eva's kitchen, when winter got serious and the wind came off the Channel, Gretel would layer sliced potatoes into a dish with warm cream and garlic and put the whole thing in the oven for an hour. The kitchen in Deal would fill with that smell, and you knew dinner was going to be good.

Erdäpfelgratin is not a recipe that tries to impress you with complexity. It's five or six ingredients and an hour of your oven doing the work. What makes it extraordinary is precision: the potatoes sliced evenly so they cook at the same rate, the cream warmed with garlic so the flavor is round instead of sharp, the covered bake that lets everything cook through before the top even thinks about browning. You get layers of tender potato held together by a cream that's thickened and reduced into something closer to a sauce than a liquid.

This is the side dish I serve at my restaurant in Salzburg with roasted pork, with Tafelspitz, with almost anything that wants a warm, golden companion on the plate. It's good Austrian home cooking at its most reliable. If you can slice a potato and pour cream, you can make this tonight. And you should.