Serves: 4

Ingredients

• 800 g of potatoes

• one clove of garlic

• 250 g of crème fraiche or equivalent (solution 2 below) - or - about 200g of liquid cream and 100g of crème fraiche (solution 1)

• Salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste.

Steps

1. Peel and thinly slice potatoes - ideally potatoes which are suitable for sautéing or salads, not purée. A mandoline is the perfect tool to do this, and you want about 3 mm thickness. You do not need to rinse the potatoes at this stage, but you can.

2. Rub a peeled clove of garlic on your baking recipient (Pyrex or ceramics best) and then butter with room temperature butter.

3. Dispose about one third of the thin slices of potatoes and season to taste with salt and nutmeg (not too much of it). Put some small knobs of butter on the slices. Start again with second third and top with the third third. Then you have two solutions:

4. Solution 1: Pour over some liquid cream - or a mixture of milk and liquid cream depending on how lean you want this to be ... - all the way to just below the top.

5. Solution 2: Or in the previous step, leave about 1 cm away from the walls of your baking recipient, and push down crème fraîche all around the sides - or your local cream equivalent.

6. Then in both cases, cover the potatoes with a thin layer of crème fraîche.

7. Put in the oven at about 170°C for 1h30 to 1h45 minutes - start testing for doneness around 1h15/1h20 just to be sure you do not go too far; you can always cook it more, you can never cook it less :-)

8. Note: if you do this for somebody who is lactose intolerant, do not use cream, add a little bit more butter, and you can add some white wine to the potatoes up to just below the top, and cover with aluminium foil for most of the cooking time, and remove for the last 15 minutes.

From Le Foodist, in Paris, France