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Pommes de Terre Nouvelles
à la Hollandaise. (New Potatoes.) Ingredients.
Two dozen new Potatoes.
Two ounces of Butter.
One tablespoonful of Béchamel Sauce.
The entry gives quantities only, in the shorthand style of a professional kitchen manual where the method was assumed. Here is what the list implies.
- What the dish actually isDespite the name, no hollandaise sauce is involved. Applied to potatoes, à la hollandaise generally indicates plainly boiled or steamed potatoes finished with butter — here bound with a spoonful of béchamel to give a light coating rather than a sauce.
- Method, reconstructedScrape or rub the skins from the new potatoes, boil or steam them in salted water until just tender (12–18 minutes depending on size), drain thoroughly, then toss over low heat with the butter and the tablespoon of béchamel until glossy. Chopped parsley would be a common finish, though the entry does not call for it.
- Two dozen new potatoesGenuinely imprecise, since it depends on grade. In practice this means small potatoes of roughly walnut size, about 1½ to 2 lb total, which serves four as a vegetable.
- BéchamelA béchamel of this period was typically a flour-and-butter roux cooked with milk or thin cream, sometimes infused with onion and a bay leaf, and reduced until it coated a spoon; richer versions built on veal stock or velouté were also in use. A single tablespoon is a binder, not a sauce — a thin, watery white sauce will slide off the potatoes.
- Scrape, do not peelNew potatoes have a skin thin enough to rub away with coarse salt or a cloth, so scraping is preferable to peeling.
- Dry them before butteringReturn the drained potatoes to the hot dry pan for a moment to drive off surface water. Butter and béchamel will not cling to wet potatoes and the dish separates on the plate.
Books of this kind — professional manuals of "high class" cookery written for cooks in large private households and hotels — carried hundreds of clipped entries like this one, on the assumption that the reader already knew how to boil a potato and needed only the proportions and the correct name to write on the menu. The French-language headings were part of that professional apparatus: a menu in French signalled a certain kind of table, and garnish names carried broadly fixed meanings across kitchens. À la hollandaise for vegetables is often explained by the plainness associated with Dutch cooking in French culinary shorthand — plainly boiled and served with butter — though this is a traditional explanation rather than an established one. New potatoes were a seasonal luxury, and the point of a dressing this restrained was to leave the flavour of the new crop alone.