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Potato Sautés
Cut cold boiled potatoes into dice; to each good-sized potato allow a tablespoonful of butter. Put it in a fryingpan; when hot put in the potatoes, a few at a time. Never put in more than will nicely cover the bottom of the pan. Stir carefully and cook the potatoes a golden brown. Dust with salt and pepper, turn into a heated dish and serve hot.
A plain sauté of leftover boiled potatoes, and the whole thing turns on pan discipline rather than technique.
- The hinge: don't crowd the panThe instruction to add "a few at a time" and never more than covers the bottom is the recipe. Piled-up dice steam in their own moisture and turn to a grey mash instead of browning; work in batches in a 10-12 inch skillet and keep the finished ones warm in a low oven.
- Butter quantityA tablespoon of butter per good-sized potato is generous by modern habit — depending on how large the potatoes are, something like 2 to 3 tablespoons for a pound. It gives the crust the recipe is after, but you can use less, or use half butter and half a neutral oil, which raises the smoke point and stops the milk solids browning too fast.
- Which potatoesBoil them the day before and refrigerate. Cold, firm, slightly dried-out potatoes hold their dice; warm ones crumble as soon as they are stirred. A waxy or all-purpose variety holds up better here than a floury baking potato.
- Dice sizeAbout half an inch. Smaller pieces brown faster but break up under stirring; larger ones need long enough in the pan that the butter darkens.
- Heat and "stir carefully"Medium-high. Let each batch sit undisturbed for two or three minutes before the first turn — stirring constantly from the start prevents any face from setting into a crust. Figure eight to ten minutes a batch.
- Season at the endThe recipe salts and peppers only after the potatoes are browned. Whatever the reasoning — salt on the surface is often said to draw out moisture and work against browning — the order is easy enough to follow. Keep it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities at all; scale it to the potatoes you have. As a rough guide, about two pounds of cold boiled potatoes will serve four as a side.
Sauté in its original French sense means "jumped" — food tossed in a shallow pan over quick heat — and American cookbooks are often said to have adopted the word for potatoes cooked this way by the late nineteenth century, perhaps distinguishing them from the deep-fried "French" or "Saratoga" sorts. The recipe is really an economy dish: it assumes a household that boiled potatoes for dinner most days and had cold ones left over, and books of this era are full of second-day treatments for them, hashed, creamed, in cakes or browned in butter.