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Parsley Potatoes
Pare potatoes and cut in balls with a French vegetable cutter (or cut in 1/2-inch cubes). Cook in boiling salted water 10 minutes. Drain, add 3 tablespoons butter, melted, mixed with 1 teaspoon lemon juice and 1 tablespoon finely minced parsley. Shake pan gently until potatoes are well mixed with the sauce.
A straightforward butter-and-herb finish for potatoes, written when a parisienne scoop was standard equipment in a well-stocked kitchen. The only real variable is the potato itself.
- The cutterA "French vegetable cutter" of this sort is generally taken to mean a parisienne scoop, sold now as a melon baller; sizes vary. The cube alternative given in the recipe works just as well; keep the pieces uniform so they finish together.
- Choose a waxy potatoBalls and cubes hold their shape only if the potato does. Yukon Gold, red-skinned or other waxy varieties survive the boiling and the shaking; a floury russet will crumble at the edges into the butter.
- Ten minutes is a starting point, not a ruleSmall scooped balls may be tender in 7 to 8 minutes, half-inch cubes closer to 10. Test with a knife tip and drain the moment they yield, since they will carry on softening in the hot pan.
- Dry them before saucingAfter draining, return the potatoes to the empty hot pan for half a minute so surface water steams off. Butter clings to a dry potato and slides off a wet one.
- Keep the butter from splittingMelt the butter gently and stir in the lemon juice and parsley off the heat, then pour over. Boiling the mixture separates it and dulls the parsley.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf has more flavor, curly more of the period look. Mince it just before use; parsley chopped in advance goes grassy and loses color.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives no potato weight and no yield. Three tablespoons of butter with a teaspoon of lemon juice is a light dressing, so judge the quantity of potatoes by eye and taste.
Pommes parisienne, boiled or browned and rolled in butter and herbs, were a fixture of the hotel and restaurant cooking that American household manuals borrowed from through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The scoop that makes them takes its name from the same source. The dish is nothing but potato, butter, lemon and parsley, and the labor of cutting each ball by hand is most of what distinguishes it. Lemon juice in the butter is a habit shared with the maitre d'hotel butter served on fish and steaks, where the acid keeps a plain butter sauce from tasting flat.