Home › French Recipes › Potatoes, Peasant Style
Potatoes, Peasant Style
3 cups potatoes 6 tablespoons bacon fat 2 cloves garlic 2 tablespoons parsley 1/2 teaspoon paprika 2 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Wash, pare and cut potatoes in dice. Fry in fat until brown. Remove potatoes and fry the chopped garlic and parsley in the fat remaining in the pan. Add flour, milk and seasonings, and cook until thickened (about five minutes). Add potatoes and cook three minutes.
A simple potato dish in cream sauce, from the era when a recipe assumed you knew how to make a roux and gave no pan size, heat level, or yield. A few notes make it behave.
- Pan and fatSix tablespoons of bacon fat in a 10- to 12-inch heavy skillet is generous but correct; the potatoes need enough fat to brown rather than steam. Rendered bacon fat gives the dish its character, but clarified butter or a neutral oil will work if you have none saved.
- Brown the potatoes properlyThe recipe does not give a dice size; cut at about 1/2 inch, which puts 3 cups at roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of potatoes. Cook them in a single layer over medium-high heat and turn them only when a crust has set, on the order of 12-15 minutes. They should be close to tender when you pull them out, since the final three minutes in sauce will not cook them through.
- Garlic and parsley timingTwo whole cloves chopped fine will scorch quickly in fat hot enough to have browned the potatoes. Drop the heat to medium before they go in, and give the garlic only a brief moment before the parsley and flour follow.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons of flour to 2 cups of milk is a thin sauce by design, meant to coat rather than bind. Add the milk gradually and whisk; the five minutes given is enough to cook out the raw flour taste at a bare simmer.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is generous if your bacon fat is salty. If the fat came from a heavily cured bacon, start with half and correct at the end.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities will serve about four as a side dish, two as a supper. It thickens as it stands, so serve it directly from the pan.
This is the kind of dish that turns up under "peasant style" or a la paysanne in American cookbooks of the 1920s and 1930s: not a specific regional French recipe so much as a shorthand for something rustic, built on potatoes, pork fat and garlic rather than butter and cream. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Delineator, a Butterick magazine whose readership was middle-class American. The bacon fat is worth noting: French country cooking might as readily use lard or the fat from salt pork, and bacon drippings were a common American kitchen standby of the period.