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Potatoes A La Provencale
Mash and pass through a sieve two pounds of potatoes, season with pepper and salt. Grate two ounces of Swiss cheese, pound it with enough butter to make a paste, add a gill of milk and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley; put this in a sauté pan, add the potatoes, mix all well together and stir until the mixture is a pale brown Serve as a pyramid.
A simple mashed-potato dish that lives or dies on the browning step. Read the last instruction first: the mixture has to sit in the pan long enough to take colour, which means a wide pan and patience rather than constant stirring.
- A gillHalf a cup in American measure, 5 fl oz in a British book of this vintage. Either amount works here; add it gradually, since two pounds of potatoes vary in how much liquid they will take before the mash slackens.
- Swiss cheeseIn a book of this period this would most likely mean Gruyere or Emmental, sold in a firm block and grated fine. Two ounces is a modest amount for two pounds of potatoes, so use a well-aged piece if you want the flavour to register.
- Pound it with butterThe cheese-and-butter paste is a mortar job, or a few pulses in a small food processor. The point is to distribute the cheese so it melts evenly instead of stringing into pockets.
- Passing through a sieveA ricer or drum sieve gives the smooth, lump-free texture the recipe assumes. Do not use a food processor or blender on cooked potato; the starch turns to glue.
- Sauté pan, not a casseroleA wide, shallow, straight-sided pan with a good conductive base. You want surface area in contact with heat, since the browning is the only cooking that happens at this stage.
- Pale brownMedium heat, and let the mixture sit for a minute or two between stirs so a light crust forms and can be folded back in. Ten to fifteen minutes is realistic. Stirring without pause will only dry the potato out.
- Butter quantity"Enough to make a paste" is genuinely open; roughly equal in weight to the cheese, so about two ounces, gives a workable paste and a rich result. Less will still bind.
- Serve as a pyramidMound it on a warm dish and shape with a palette knife or the back of a spoon while it is still hot and pliable. Two pounds of potatoes serves four to six as a side.
"A la proven fale" in nineteenth-century cookery writing usually signalled garlic and olive oil, but by the time it reached English and American household books the tag had loosened into little more than a marker of southern French style, and here it attaches to a dish built on butter, Alpine cheese and parsley with no garlic in sight. That drift is typical of compilations of this kind, which are often said to have borrowed French names from restaurant and hotel cookery to dress up plain vegetable cookery for middle-class kitchens. The technique underneath is sound and probably older than the label: mashed potato enriched with grated hard cheese and browned in a pan suggests a mountain-kitchen habit of the sort generally associated with Savoy and Switzerland, and the instruction to serve it heaped as a pyramid reflects a taste for moulded, architectural presentation of even the humblest side dish.