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POTATOES (a la Provencale)
Put a small piece of butter or three table-spoonfuls of oil into a stewpan, with three beads of garlic, the rind of a quarter of a lemon, and some parsley, all chopped very fine; add a little grated nutmeg, pepper and salt. Peel some small potatoes, and let them stew in this mixture until tender. If large potatoes are used they must be cut up into pieces. Add the juice of a lemon before serving.
A gentle fat-braise rather than a fry: the potatoes cook slowly in seasoned oil or butter until tender, with lemon juice thrown in at the end to lift the whole thing. Two details in the original wording need translating.
- "Three beads of garlic"Beads here almost certainly means cloves, not heads; three heads would be inedible. The recipe gives no weight of potatoes, but three cloves suits a modest dish for four.
- The rindPare the zest of a quarter lemon thinly with a knife or peeler and chop it fine with the parsley and garlic, avoiding the white pith. The result is essentially a persillade with lemon.
- Stewpan and heatA stewpan is a heavy, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Keep the heat low and covered — the potatoes are meant to steam in the fat, not colour, and three tablespoons of oil will not go far on a fierce burner.
- Add a little liquidWith modern thin-based pans, two or three tablespoons of water or stock at the start prevents the garlic scorching before the potatoes soften. It cooks away by the end.
- TimingSmall new potatoes, whole, take 25 to 35 minutes covered; large ones cut into 1-inch pieces take about 20. Shake the pan rather than stirring hard, or they break up.
- Nutmeg and seasoning"A little grated nutmeg" means a scant pinch — it should sit behind the garlic, not in front of it. Salt at the start so it penetrates.
- The lemon juiceOff the heat, at the table's edge. Added earlier it dulls, and acid slows potatoes from softening.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no weight. Three tablespoons of oil and three cloves of garlic suit roughly 1½ lb of potatoes, serving four as a side.
Late-Victorian English cookery books seem to have used "à la provençale" as shorthand for the three things that marked southern French cooking to a British eye: olive oil instead of butter, garlic in quantity, and a finish of lemon or parsley. Cassell's, being a dictionary, hedges by offering butter *or* oil — plausibly a concession to readers for whom olive oil was not yet a kitchen staple, and to a palate that still associated garlic with the Continent. The chopped garlic-parsley-zest mixture is a *persillade*, still standard in Provençal kitchens, and the technique of stewing potatoes slowly in their seasoned fat rather than boiling them was one of the more genuinely regional things an English household book of the period could pass along. The pairing of the finished dish with lemon juice, rather than vinegar, is the detail that keeps it out of ordinary sauté territory.