Several people have asked for details on how to make this, so here we go.
You need potatoes, lardons, onions, cream, milk, salt and pepper. And grated cheese. And butter.
Slice up the onions fairly thinly – about 1-2mm slices. Put them in a pan with hot butter and the lardons and fry them off until the onions are transparent and the lardons cooked through.
While this is cooking, slice your potatoes. I cut them 2mm thick using a mandoline (details on mandolines here – bonus chip recipe!) – be careful not to cut your fingers.
You need enough potatoes sliced to roughly fill your chosen container – I use a Pyrex dish, something more rustic is fine. I don’t bother peeling the potatoes first because I’m lazy and the skin’s good for you.
Put the potatoes in the dish, pour in enough cream and milk to almost cover them, put the lardons over the top and squish them into the crevices and in between the slices of potatoes.
Cover with a piece of tin foil and pop into the oven at 180°C for an hour. Uncover and check the potatoes are cooked, then sprinkle over a couple of handfuls of grated cheese, then back into the oven for another 10 minutes. Finish it with a few minutes under the grill if you like it really crispy.
A couple of notes:
- Yes, you can add garlic, either minced up with the onion or just cut a piece in half and wipe it around the inside of your baking dish. I don't do this because my young daughters find the taste too strong.
- Yes, you can add Reblochon cheese to the recipe. The problem with this is its price - the entire cost of the above version of the recipe is about €2; adding €12-15 worth of Reblochon changes the economics completely.
- No you can't add mushrooms. Mushrooms? Really?
- Actually you can add anything you want. Except white wine, as Felicity Cloake does in The Guardian. That's just wrong.