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Parsley Potatoes (Wash pare and cut potatoes)
Wash, pare and cut potatoes in one-half inch cubes; there should be three cups. Blanch by parboiling five minutes in boiling salted water; drain. Melt one-third cup of butter in a frying-pan, add potatoes, and cook over a slow fire until potatoes are soft and delicately browned. Melt two tablespoons Cottolene in a sauce-pan, add a few drops onion juice, one and one-half tablespoons flour, onehalf teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper; stir to a smooth paste and pour on slowly one cup hot milk, stirring constantly. Remove from range and add one egg yolk slightly beaten. Pour sauce over potatoes and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A straightforward potato dish with an old-fashioned egg-enriched white sauce. The only real obstacles are one vanished brand-name fat and the point at which the yolk goes in.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening heavily promoted by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and one of this book's sponsors — it appears constantly in 52 Sunday Dinners for that reason. Use butter or a neutral oil in the same amount; two tablespoons of either makes the roux.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. A few drops is a whisper of flavour, not a substitute for chopped onion.
- Slow fireMedium-low on a modern burner. The potatoes are already parboiled, so the pan work is about colour and finishing them through — expect 10 to 15 minutes with occasional turning rather than constant stirring, which breaks the cubes.
- Blanching mattersFive minutes in boiling salted water sets the outside and shortens the frying, which is what keeps half-inch cubes from browning hard before the centres soften. Drain them well and let the surface steam dry or they will spit in the butter.
- The yolk is the hingeTake the sauce off the heat before the yolk goes in, as written, and beat it in quickly. If the pan goes back on a direct flame the yolk scrambles and the sauce turns grainy; residual heat is enough to thicken it.
- Butter quantityA third of a cup of butter for three cups of potato is generous by modern habit. Two or three tablespoons will brown them adequately in a heavy or nonstick pan.
- YieldThree cups of diced potato is roughly a pound — four side-dish servings. The sauce comes to about a cup, enough to coat rather than flood.
- Serve at onceThe sauce sets and skins over as it cools, and the browned edges soften under it. Dress the potatoes at the table or immediately before carrying them in.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published by the makers of Cottolene, and it belongs to a genre of American cookbook written to sell a specific fat — recipes that call for butter in the frying pan and the sponsor's shortening in the sauce, as this one does, are a familiar compromise in such books. The dish itself is a plain treatment: parboiled diced potatoes finished in fat and masked with a white sauce, the sauce enriched at the last moment with an egg yolk. Fannie Farmer and her Boston Cooking School contemporaries were drilling home cooks in the roux-and-milk foundation on which many vegetable sauces of the period were built.