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New Potatoes with Chive Sauce
Scrape off the skin, remove the "eyes" with a sharp pointed knife and scrub them with a vegetable brush, rinse thoroughly and put in sauce pan, add boiling water to cover; season with salt, cover and cook until soft, drain. If small, serve whole; if large, cut them in one-half inch cubes and reheat in Chive Sauce.
A straightforward June side dish that assumes you have the book's chive sauce already in hand. The only real technique here is not overcooking thin-skinned early potatoes.
- Chive sauceThe original leans on a separate recipe not reproduced here; a chive sauce of this period is generally a plain white sauce finished with snipped chives. Add the chives at the end so they keep their colour and bite.
- "New" potatoesThese are immature potatoes lifted early, with skin so thin it rubs away. That is why the recipe says scrape rather than peel. If your potatoes take a peeler easily they are storage potatoes and will behave differently, holding less shape and absorbing more water.
- Skin on is fineModern practice usually leaves new-potato skin in place, though this recipe directs that it be scraped off. Scrubbing and a knife-tip pass over the eyes is enough.
- Timing"Cook until soft" means tender to a skewer, roughly 12-18 minutes for golf-ball sizes at a gentle boil. Push past that and they slump and turn watery, which ruins the cubed presentation.
- Start in boiling waterPotatoes are more usually started in cold water so the outside does not disintegrate before the centre cooks. With small new potatoes the difference is slight, but keep the boil moderate rather than violent.
- SaltSeason the cooking water properly, about 1 tsp per quart. Unsalted potatoes cannot be rescued by sauce.
- Drying before saucingAfter draining, return the pan to low heat for a minute to steam off surface water. Wet potatoes thin the sauce.
- YieldNot given. Allow 5-6 oz of potatoes and about a quarter of a cup of sauce per person; 2 lb of potatoes and 1 1/2 cups of sauce serves six.
Elizabeth O. Hiller built 52 Sunday Dinners around the calendar, and this dish sits in June, in the stretch of the year when small potatoes and chives were both to hand. Chives were one of the few fresh herbs a city household could count on before refrigerated shipping, being hardy, perennial and easily grown in a window box, which may help explain how often they turn up in period cookery. The white sauce underneath is the workhorse of the era, the same base that carried creamed peas, creamed onions and creamed dried beef, and dressing a vegetable in it was a common way to lift a plain boiled side to Sunday-table status.