Beautiful potato casserole for any holiday or gathering!

National Potato Day is two weeks away, on Tuesday, August 19. This year, I’m going to the source. If you’re going to make pasta, you go to the Italians. And if you’re going to make potatoes, you go to the Irish. Many years ago, some friends gave me a copy of In Good Taste, a cook book from the Irish Countrywomen’s Association.

Our game group met the day after Saint Patrick’s Day a few years ago, and so we did a Saint Patrick’s Day theme for the food. I made these garlic potatoes. The other dishes were Irish coddle and corned beef hash. So, apropos of Monty Python, we had potatoes, potatoes, and potatoes.

It was good. “The holy trinity” as one of the friends who gave me the book said when I described the recipe to them. It was so good that I made it again for Christmas with family the same year, which is where the photos come from.

These potatoes need to be sliced thin. A knife is fine, but it will help to have a mandoline (which I used) or a food processor with a thin slicing attachment. When they’re done, the potatoes must be almost as tender as mashed.

I call them “Whitegate Garlic Potatoes” because Peggy Bowler, who submitted them to the Irish Countrywomen’s Association cookbook, called them “Garlic Potatoes”. And she’s from the Whitegate Guild of the organization.

The unbaked potatoes, covered in cream, waiting for the oven.

And Holy Saint Patrick, Batman, are these good.

Looking on the recipe now, I realize I used slightly less milk and cream as the recipe calls for. It calls for a quarter pint of milk and a carton of cream. Assuming that a carton of cream is a pint, that’s four ounces of milk and sixteen ounces of cream.

Except that these are imperial measurements. Their pints are about 20% larger than ours. So if you want to go full Irish, do about 4.8 ounces of milk and 19.2 ounces of cream.

Obviously, it helps to have a digital scale.

Could you also spice it up a bit with rosemary, sage, or oregano? Probably. The basic recipe is so good I’ve never even tried adding more spices to it. When I made it over last year’s holidays, I realized that I don’t even add salt to it. I’ve long suspected that many recipes, especially in community cookbooks, leave out salt expecting you to add it without it being in the ingredient list. That may be true in this case, but there appears to be enough salt in the cheese. I wouldn’t be surprised if a quarter to a half teaspoon of salt would improve it, and I may try that the next time I make it.

Or I may not. This really is good as is. Garlic, potatoes, and fat: that’s my food trinity.