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New Potatoes in Cream
Scrape and boil new potatoes until tender; cover with cream sauce to which a little chopped parsley has been added, and serve.
A two-line recipe that assumes you know how to make a cream sauce and how to handle genuinely new potatoes. Both assumptions are worth unpacking.
- What "new" meansNew potatoes are freshly lifted, thin-skinned tubers whose sugars have not yet converted to starch — not simply small potatoes. Look for skins that rub away under your thumb; anything with a set, papery skin is a storage potato and will not have the same waxy bite.
- Scraping, not peelingThe skin on a true new potato comes off with the back of a knife or a rough cloth under running water. Peeling with a vegetable peeler takes off flesh and wastes the best part.
- Cream sauceIn books of this period "cream sauce" usually means a white sauce of the bechamel type, sometimes made with cream rather than milk. A workable version is about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk or light cream — a medium sauce; use half the butter and flour if you want it thinner — the roux cooked a minute or two before the liquid goes in, seasoned with salt and white pepper. Actual heavy cream reduced on its own also works and is closer to what the name suggests.
- Cooking the potatoesStart them in salted cold water, bring to a boil and simmer 12–20 minutes depending on size. Test with a skewer rather than a fork — new potatoes split easily and a split potato bleeds starch into the sauce.
- Drain and dryThe hinge of the dish. Wet potatoes thin the sauce into milk. Drain well and return them to the hot dry pan for half a minute to steam off surface water before the sauce goes on.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work; add it off the heat so it stays green. A tablespoon per pound of potatoes is about right.
- YieldFigure 6 oz of potatoes per person as a side dish, so 2 lb and a cup of sauce serves four to five.
Creamed vegetables run through American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a consistency that says more about the sauce than the vegetable: once the white sauce of butter, flour and milk had been standardised in cooking-school teaching, it was applied to almost everything the kitchen garden produced — peas, onions, cabbage, carrots, dried beef. New potatoes were seasonal in a way that is hard to feel now, arriving in late spring and early summer from the first digging while the previous year's storage crop was going soft in the cellar, and they were treated accordingly: scraped rather than peeled, boiled whole, and dressed simply. The book's brief, proportion-only entry of this kind assumes a cook who already knew how cream sauce behaved.