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New Potatoes a la France
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 lbs. new potatoes 2 springs mint 1 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1 tablespoonful lemon juice Wash and scrape potatoes. With round vegetable cutter scoop out from potatoes a number of little balls like marbles; boil these till tender in water, to which have been added salt and mint. Drain, add Crisco, parsley, and lemon juice. Toss them about gently in pan a few minutes, and serve on hot dish.
A straightforward dish that needs only a few notes on units, fat and the scale of waste involved.
- Crisco stands in for butterThis book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, so the shortening appears where a French cook would have used butter. Three tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour with the mint and lemon; use the shortening only if you want a neutral, dairy-free finish.
- "2 springs mint" is a typo for sprigsTwo sprigs of fresh mint, stems and all, dropped into the boiling water. They are removed with the water, not served; the mint is there to perfume the potatoes from the inside.
- The balls cost you most of the potatoScooping marbles from 2 lb of new potatoes may leave you with only about half the weight as finished potato, so expect four small servings at best. Keep the trimmings for soup or mash rather than binning them.
- Use the small end of a melon ballerUse a melon baller -- The "round vegetable cutter" is a melon baller or Parisienne scoop; the recipe gives no size beyond "like marbles." Marbles of that size cook through quickly, but test with a skewer rather than by the clock, as the balls vary.
- Salt the water properlyA teaspoon of salt in a pan of water is light for 2 lb of potatoes. Salt until the water tastes distinctly seasoned, since the potatoes take on almost all their seasoning here.
- Dry them before the fat goes inDrain and let the balls steam dry in the hot pan for half a minute. Wet potatoes will not take a gloss, and the lemon juice will pool instead of clinging.
- Lemon juice last, off high heatAdd the parsley and lemon juice with the pan barely warm and toss briefly. Prolonged heat dulls both the acid and the green of the parsley.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook issued by a manufacturer, in this case Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco hydrogenated vegetable shortening in 1911 and needed to teach cooks what to do with it. Recipes in such books are ordinary recipes with the sponsor's product written into the ingredient list, which is why shortening turns up here in a buttered-potato dish. The technique itself is older and genuinely French: cutting vegetables into uniform spheres with a scoop is the pommes parisienne idea, and it is a laborious one. Mint boiled with new potatoes, by contrast, is a British habit rather than a French one, so the dish as written sits somewhere between the two despite its name.