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Carlsbad Potatoes
Wash and pare one dozen small, uniform-sized potatoes; soak one hour in cold water to cover. Drain, put in stew-pan and cover with one quart of boiling water. Add two tablespoons butter and two teaspoons salt. Cook until soft (but not broken), then drain. Return to stew-pan. Add one-third cup butter, one and one-half tablespoons lemon juice, and one-eighth teaspoon paprika. Cook four or five minutes, shaking the pan occasionally. Place in hot serving dish and sprinkle with one tablespoon chopped parsley.
A straightforward buttered potato dish that depends almost entirely on not overcooking the potatoes. Everything after the first drain is finishing work.
- The hingeThe recipe asks for the potatoes to be cooked "until soft (but not broken)" and drained at that point, since they get four or five more minutes of cooking in butter afterward; err on the underdone side. Test with a skewer rather than a fork, which tears the surface and starts them falling apart.
- Size and quantityA dozen small potatoes means new potatoes or the smallest of the crop, roughly 1½ to 2 inches across, about 1½ to 2 lb total. Uniform size matters more than variety, since they all leave the water at the same moment. Waxy potatoes hold together far better than russets here.
- The hour's soakSoaking pared potatoes in cold water draws out surface starch and, in a period kitchen, kept them from darkening before dinner. It is not essential if you are cooking them straight away.
- Butter, both timesTwo tablespoons go into the boiling water and a further one-third cup — about 5⅓ tablespoons, or roughly 75 g — goes in at the finish. That second addition is the sauce, so use good butter and work it together with the lemon juice as you shake the pan.
- Shaking, not stirringA spoon will break up the pared potatoes. Grip the pan handle and jerk it so they roll and coat themselves; keep the heat moderate so the butter foams without browning.
- PaprikaAn eighth of a teaspoon is for color, not heat. The paprika of the period would generally have been a mild sweet type; modern smoked paprika will dominate the lemon and butter entirely.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, six if the rest of the menu is generous. Best served the moment it leaves the pan — the butter sauce breaks and dulls as it cools.
The name points to Carlsbad, the German form of Karlovy Vary in Bohemia, the spa town whose kitchens and confectioners lent their name to a list of turn-of-the-century menu items — Carlsbad plums, Carlsbad wafers, Carlsbad rolls. American cookbook writers of the period attached European place names to simple dishes freely, and the connection is often a matter of fashion rather than provenance; there is little to suggest this particular treatment of buttered potatoes was ever cooked in Bohemia. 52 Sunday Dinners is arranged as a year's sequence of seasonal dinners, so a cook could serve something appropriate to the season without planning.