Home › Vegetables › French Potato Balls
French Potato Balls
Cut two cups of potato balls with French potato cutter. Parboil ten minutes, drain, and fry in deep fat.
Potatoes à la Maître d'Hôtel Cook two cups potato balls in boiling water until tender. Drain, and serve with maître d'hôtel butter.
Two variations on the same preparation, both depending on evenly cut balls of raw potato. The cutting tool and the fat temperature are what decide the result.
- The French potato cutterThis is the Parisienne scoop, sold today as a melon baller, usually about 1 inch or 3/4 inch across. Press it into a peeled raw potato and twist. Bigger potatoes are easier to work than small ones; the trimmings go to soup or mash.
- Choose a firm potatoA waxy or all-purpose potato (Yukon Gold, red-skinned) holds a sphere through parboiling and frying. A dry mealy russet crumbles at the edges once it softens.
- Ten minutes is too longFor 1-inch balls, 3 to 5 minutes in salted boiling water is enough to set the outside and leave a firm centre. Ten minutes leaves them soft enough to collapse in the fryer. Test with the point of a knife rather than the clock.
- Dry them before the fatDrain, spread on a towel, and leave until the surface looks matte. Wet parboiled potatoes spit violently in deep fat and steam themselves rather than browning.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature or test for the fat. Use 375F; the balls should surface and colour in 3 to 4 minutes. Fry in two or three batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Maître d'hôtel butterNot a separate purchase — butter creamed soft with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, roughly a tablespoon of parsley and a teaspoon of juice to 4 tablespoons of butter. Roll in paper and chill, then cut coins over the hot drained potatoes.
- YieldTwo cups of balls is roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound of trimmed potato and serves three or four as a side.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker — a house cookbook that ranged well past confectionery into full household cookery. These two entries belong to the French service vocabulary that American cookbooks of the period were busy absorbing: potatoes cut with a scoop are pommes parisienne or pommes noisette, the classic distinction being one of size, with noisette balls the smaller, hazelnut-sized ones, and the shape mattered because uniform garnishes were the visible mark of a trained kitchen. Maître d'hôtel butter is customarily said to take its name from the head of the dining room, the steward, and is the simplest of the compound butters codified in nineteenth-century French practice; it appears in American books of this era attached to steak, fish and boiled vegetables alike. That a chocolate company's promotional volume includes a French potato cutter as assumed equipment says something about how far restaurant technique had reached into the well-appointed home kitchen by 1907.