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POTATOES (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Boil or steam a dozen kidney potatoes in the usual way, and cut them into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Put them into a saucepan with two or three table-spoonfuls of white sauce or gravy, two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, four ounces of butter, and a little pepper and salt. Shake the saucepan over the fire until the potatoes are covered with the sauce and quite hot, then squeeze over them the juice of a large fresh lemon, and serve. Time, ten minutes to heat the sliced potatoes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
POTATOES (a la Maitre d'Hotel), another way.
Wash the potatoes, and boil them in their jackets in salt and water. When they are done, let them cool, then turn them in the shape of large corks, and cut them into slices about as thick as a shilling--if the slices are too thin they will break in the sauce. Make a butter sauce, mix with it a little chopped parsley, pepper, salt, a little glaze, and the juice of a lemon if acid is required. Take care that the sauce is neither curdled nor too thick, and pour it gently over the potatoes after they are dished.
Two versions of the same idea: cooked potatoes reheated in a parsley-lemon butter. The whole thing stands or falls on the slices staying intact and the butter staying emulsified.
- Keep the butter from splittingBoth versions rely on butter held in suspension in a little liquid. Keep the pan at a bare simmer and move it constantly; a hard boil will break the sauce into oil and watery sediment. The second version's warning that the sauce must be "neither curdled nor too thick" is the hinge of the recipe.
- Kidney potatoesAn old English name for the long, waxy, kidney-shaped varieties — the family that includes Jersey Royals and modern fingerlings. Any firm waxy potato works; floury baking types will collapse into mash as soon as you shake the pan.
- Slice thicknessA quarter of an inch is about 6 mm. A shilling in the second version is roughly 1.5 mm, which is very thin indeed — the recipe's own caveat about breakage suggests erring nearer 3 mm unless you are confident.
- Turned "in the shape of large corks"Trim each boiled potato into a neat cylinder before slicing, so every round is the same diameter. Purely for looks, and it wastes a fair amount of potato; skip it for a family table.
- GlazeMeat glaze, or glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup. A teaspoon of good reduced stock or a little demi-glace gives the same effect. Omit it and the sauce is simply a parsley butter, which is no loss.
- White sauce and butter sauceThe first is a thin bechamel or velouté; the "butter sauce" of the second is the Victorian melted-butter sauce, butter worked into a little flour-thickened water. A few spoonfuls of cream or stock mounted with cold butter gives a better modern result.
- Butter quantityFour ounces (115 g) to a dozen potatoes is generous. Half that is ample if you are not serving this alongside plain roast meat.
- Lemon lastThe juice goes in off the heat, or at most at the very end. Acid added early and held over the fire encourages the emulsion to break and dulls the parsley.
- Yield and timingServes four or five as a side. Ten minutes is for reheating already-cooked potatoes; boil or steam them ahead, and ideally let them cool and firm up before slicing.
A la maitre d'hotel — named for the head steward or butler of a household, the hôtel in the sense of a great house — is French kitchen shorthand for the simplest of finishes: butter, chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. In classical practice it takes the form of a compound butter kneaded cold and sliced onto grilled steaks and fish, but it was applied just as readily to boiled potatoes, and by the later nineteenth century maitre d'hotel potatoes appear to have been a familiar sight on the English dinner table as an accompaniment to plain roast and grilled meats. Cassell's gives two versions because the dish sat on the line between family cookery and dressed-up service: the first is a quick reheat in a shaken pan, the second turns each potato to a uniform cylinder and masks it with sauce after dishing, which is restaurant work. The costing in pence, a standing feature of Cassell's, is a reminder of who the book was written for — households running a cook on a fixed weekly allowance, for whom 8d. worth of potatoes and butter feeding five was information worth printing.