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POTATOES AU LARD (a French recipe)
Cut some bacon into small pieces, put these in a stewpan with a bit of butter, and let them brown. When the bacon is three-parts done, throw in a little flour, add salt, pepper, parsley, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a bay-leaf. Moisten with some stock. When these ingredients have boiled a few minutes, put in the potatoes half done, peeled, and cut into pieces. Skim clean, and serve.
A one-pan potato stew built on a bacon-and-flour roux — essentially pommes de terre au lard, still cooked in French home kitchens. The instructions assume you know a few things the book never states.
- The baconFrench lard here means fat salt pork or unsmoked streaky bacon cut into lardons, roughly 4-5 oz for 2 lb of potatoes. Modern thin-sliced smoked bacon works but pushes the dish much saltier and smokier than intended; cut it from a slab if you can.
- "Three-parts done"Brown the lardons until about three-quarters cooked — coloured and rendered, still soft rather than crisp. They finish in the liquid, and bacon browned hard at this stage turns leathery by the end.
- The flour"A little flour" is about a tablespoon for this quantity, stirred into the rendered fat and cooked a minute before the stock goes in. It is a light binding roux, not a thick sauce; the finished dish should coat the potatoes, not set around them.
- Bunch of sweet herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme and the bay leaf tied together, or bundled in cheesecloth so it can be lifted out. The parsley listed earlier among the seasonings appears to be separate from it.
- Stock quantityThe book gives none. Use enough to come about halfway up the potatoes — roughly 1 to 1½ cups for 2 lb — and season lightly, since the bacon and the reduction will both add salt.
- Potatoes half donePar-boil whole peeled potatoes for about 8-10 minutes, then cut into large chunks. Waxy varieties hold their shape; floury ones will collapse into the sauce, which some cooks prefer and which is not a fault so much as a different dish.
- FinishingSimmer covered 15-20 minutes until a knife goes through easily, skimming the fat that rises. Pull the bouquet garni before serving.
- Vessel and yieldA "stewpan" is a wide, straight-sided saucepan with a lid — any heavy sauté pan or Dutch oven serves. The recipe gives no quantities; at the 2 lb of potatoes assumed above it would feed about four as a side dish, or two as a supper with bread.
Potatoes cooked au lard — with salt pork — belong to the plain provincial French cooking that Cassell's Dictionary collected alongside grander restaurant work, and the pairing is old: cured pork fat is generally said to have been the everyday cooking medium across much of rural France well into the twentieth century, with butter often described as regional and oil as southern. The recipe's logic is thrift rather than luxury. A few ounces of bacon, a spoon of flour and whatever stock the kitchen had going turn a cheap root vegetable into a dish substantial enough to stand as a meal. Cassell's habit of tagging such entries "a French recipe" reflects the late-Victorian assumption that French practice carried authority in the English kitchen, even for something as unassuming as stewed potatoes; the label sold the method as much as it described its origin.