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Potatoes Barigoule
Peel and wash as many small potatoes as will be needed for the meal. Place in a saucepan and pour over them sufficient clear soup stock to cover. Add ½ of a teaspoonful of salt and boil until tender, then drain. In a small saucepan have heating sufficient fat to immerse the potatoesthe originator of this recipe calls for olive oil. When the fat is smoking hot gently drop in it the potatoes and cook just long enough to color them a uniform brown. Drain on paper, place in a serving dish, sprinkle with salt, pepper and 1 tablespoonful of vinegar and serve quickly.
A two-stage potato: simmered in stock, then fried until brown and finished with vinegar. The stock does the seasoning work, so the quality of the broth decides the dish.
- The hingeDrain the boiled potatoes thoroughly and let the surface steam dry for a few minutes before frying. Wet potatoes dropped into smoking-hot oil will spit violently and steam rather than brown.
- Salt quantityThe salt figure in the original has lost its fraction and reads as "12 of a teaspoonful"; half a teaspoonful is the sensible reading, added to the pot as a whole, and less if the stock is already seasoned.
- "Clear soup stock"An unthickened, strained meat or poultry broth. Unsalted or low-sodium stock gives you control over the seasoning here, since the recipe salts the potatoes again at the end.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot" was the only gauge available; use 350-375F. Olive oil, which the recipe credits to the originator, can smoke at the upper end of that range in its unrefined form, so a refined olive oil or another neutral oil is easier to manage at this heat.
- Potato choiceSmall waxy potatoes hold together through boiling and frying. Floury varieties break up once tender and will not survive the second cooking.
- Don't overboilCook only until a knife meets slight resistance, not until fully soft. They finish cooking in the oil, and fully soft potatoes collapse when they hit the fat.
- The vinegarOne tablespoon of vinegar goes on at the last moment, off the heat. Added earlier it will steam off and the potatoes will go soft; red wine vinegar suits the dish better than distilled white.
- YieldReckon about 6 oz of small potatoes per person as a side dish, and fry in batches so the oil temperature does not crash.
Barigoule is a Provencal term, most often attached to artichokes stewed with oil, and the name is generally traced to a mushroom once cooked the same way. Applied to potatoes here, it signals the method rather than the vegetable: cooked in liquid, browned in olive oil, sharpened with vinegar. The recipe is economical: the potatoes are boiled in soup stock so that yesterday's stockpot seasons today's vegetable, and nothing is bought except the potatoes and the oil. The deference to "the originator of this recipe" who "calls for olive oil" is a period tell. In American kitchens of the time olive oil was an imported specialty item.