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Potatoes, New, Stewed in Butter
Take new potatoes when they first come into season and are young and small. Rub off the skins with a flannel or coarse cloth, wash and dry the potatoes well, and put them into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter--four ounces will be enough for a good-sized dish. Let them steam gently until they are done enough, shaking the saucepan every two or three minutes, that they may be equally cooked. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper over them, and serve very hot. Time to stew, about half an hour. Probable cost, when they first come into the market, 1s. per pound or more. Sufficient, three pounds for a dish.
A butter-steam rather than a boil: the potatoes cook in their own moisture with no added water, which is what gives them their flavour and also what makes them easy to scorch.
- The hinge: lid on, heat very lowThere is no water in the pan, so everything depends on trapping the steam the potatoes give off. Use a heavy pan with a tight lid over the lowest possible heat, and keep shaking every few minutes as directed; a thin pan on a fierce burner will brown the butter and stick the potatoes before the centres are done.
- Rubbing off the skins"Rub off the skins with a flannel or coarse cloth" means scrubbing rather than peeling. On genuinely new potatoes the skin is loose and comes away under a rough cloth or a stiff brush; a scourer works as well. Dry them properly afterwards, since surface water dilutes the butter and stews rather than steams them.
- Butter quantityFour ounces is 115 g, about a stick, for three pounds (1.4 kg) of potatoes. That is generous by design, since the butter is the cooking medium as well as the sauce. Two ounces will do if the potatoes are small and the pan tight, but the dish is less good for it.
- Size matters more than timeHalf an hour assumes the small, even-sized early potatoes the recipe calls for. Anything larger should be halved, or the outsides will collapse before the middles soften. Test with a skewer rather than watching the clock.
- Seasoning at the endSalt is added after cooking, not before. Salting early draws water out of the potatoes and into the butter, which defeats the point of steaming them dry.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives three pounds as enough for one dish, which would serve roughly six to eight as a side. Serve straight from the pan with the buttery pan juices poured over; a handful of chopped mint or parsley thrown in at the last minute is traditional with early potatoes and does no harm here.
- On the price note"1s. per pound or more" reflects the cost of the very earliest potatoes of the season, not a normal price. It is a marker of luxury rather than a shopping instruction.
New potatoes were a seasonal event in Victorian Britain in a way they no longer are. The first small, thin-skinned tubers came from the warmest early-cropping ground — growers in places such as the Channel Islands and Cornwall, and the market gardens close to the big cities — and reached the London market at prices that put them briefly among the luxuries, which is consistent with Cassell's shilling-a-pound note. Recipes of the period often did as little to them as possible: no water, no sauce, nothing but butter, salt and pepper. The technique of stewing vegetables gently in butter alone under a covered pan, sometimes called sweating or, in French kitchens, cooking à l'étuvée, appears in nineteenth-century household manuals and survives essentially unchanged. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, published in the 1870s and reissued in expanded form for decades after, arranged its material alphabetically as a reference work rather than a menu, so potatoes accumulate many entries of this kind — each a small variation for a cook deciding what to do with what the greengrocer had that morning.