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Potatoes, with Sauce Piquant
Wash, pare, and half-boil some large potatoes. Drain them, and when nearly cold cut them into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Cut two or three rashers of fat bacon into small pieces, place them in a stewpan with a finely-minced onion, and let them steam until the onion is tender. Add a little pepper and salt, a lump of sugar, a bay-leaf, and as much stock or water as will barely cover the sliced potatoes. This sauce should be thickened with flour to make it of the consistency of thick cream, and as much vinegar may be added as will make it agreeably acid. Let the sauce boil a few minutes, put in the sliced potatoes, and let them simmer till they are tender without being broken. Serve very hot, with the sauce poured over them. Time, an hour or more. Probable cost, potatoes, 1d. or 2d. per pound. Sufficient, six large potatoes for two or three persons.
A German-style hot potato dish dressed in French clothing: bacon, onion, a sweet-sour thickened gravy. The whole thing hinges on the potatoes being parboiled and cooled before slicing, so they hold their shape through the second cooking.
- Choose a waxy potatoA floury variety will collapse into the sauce. A waxy or all-purpose potato (Charlotte, Yukon Gold, red-skinned) survives being half-boiled, sliced and simmered again.
- Half-boil, then coolBoil whole and peeled for roughly 10-12 minutes, until a knife meets resistance at the centre, then drain and let them cool to nearly cold, as the recipe directs, before slicing. Warm potatoes tear on the knife and disintegrate in the pan; cooled slices firm up and stay intact.
- "Let them steam"This means covered over low heat so the bacon renders and the onion softens without colouring, about 10 minutes. It is not a browning step, and the sauce is better for it.
- ThickeningStir a rounded tablespoon of flour into the rendered bacon fat and cook it a minute before the liquid goes in, rather than adding flour to hot stock. Add only as much stock as will barely cover the sliced potatoes in a wide pan, as the recipe directs.
- Sugar and vinegarA "lump" of Victorian loaf sugar was cut by hand and varied in size, but a teaspoon is a reasonable reading. Start with two tablespoons of cider or white wine vinegar, taste, and add more; the sauce should read sharp against the bacon fat, not merely tangy.
- The stewpanUse a heavy, wide pan with a lid. Depth is the enemy here, since the slices need to lie in more or less one layer to cook evenly without being stirred.
- The stated time"An hour or more" covers the whole operation including the first boiling. Once the slices go into the sauce, 10-15 minutes at a bare simmer is enough; longer and they break up, which the recipe itself warns against.
- YieldSix large potatoes for two or three as a course in its own right, or four to six as a side with pork, sausages or cold meat.
Sauce piquante in nineteenth-century English cookery books generally meant a brown or thickened sauce sharpened with vinegar, usually with onion and often a bay-leaf, and it was commonly used for reheating cooked meat or vegetables that needed livening. The version here, with bacon, onion, a little sugar and vinegar poured over sliced potatoes, closely resembles the hot potato salad eaten across southern Germany and Alsace, under French terminology. The book gives the price per pound rather than for the dish, which tells you what potatoes were: the cheapest bulk on the table, and worth a sauce precisely because the sauce cost so little to add.