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Chafing-dish Dainties (Chopping Pour over the potato)
chopping. Pour over the potato a little hot stock, or water, and scatter some bits of butter over the top. Cover, and cook slowly, without stirring or browning, until thoroughly heated.
String Beans à la Lyonnaise.
Melt three tablespoonfuls of butter in the blazer; add a fine-sliced onion and sauté to a delicate brown; add a quart of string beans, cooked, a dash of pepper, a grating of nutmeg and a little salt; heat thoroughly, tossing the beans occasionally; add a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, a tablespoonful of lemon juice and another tablespoonful of butter, in bits, and serve at once.
Two fragments run together here: the tail of a potato dish, then a complete recipe for string beans in the Lyonnaise manner. Both assume a chafing dish, but a heavy skillet does everything the blazer did.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame; the water pan below it is for gentle holding, not for this. Any 10-inch skillet over medium heat is the equivalent.
- A quart of cooked beans"a quart of string beans, cooked" most likely means measured after cooking, which would take somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of trimmed fresh beans, blanched until just tender and drained well. Wet beans will steam rather than glaze in the butter.
- The onion is the dish"Lyonnaise" signals onion. The recipe asks for "a delicate brown," which still wants more than a minute or two in the pan; rushing it leaves a raw bite that the lemon juice will not cover.
- Lemon and butter lastThe final tablespoon of butter goes in cold, in pieces, off or nearly off the heat, so it emulsifies with the lemon juice into a light sauce instead of separating into grease.
- NutmegA grating means a few passes on a microplane from a whole nutmeg, well under 1/8 teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter and stale-tasting; use less of it if that is what you have.
- The potato fragmentIt is the end of a warmed-potato preparation: chopped cooked potato, a few tablespoons of hot stock, butter dotted on top, covered and heated through without stirring. The point is to avoid browning or mashing, so keep the heat low.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a quart of beans would serve about four to six as a side dish.
Chafing-dish cookery had a considerable vogue in American homes around 1900, when books like this one were aimed at hostesses without much kitchen help and at the late-supper habit that followed the theatre or a card party. The appeal was partly practical and partly theatrical: a small alcohol lamp, a copper pan, and a dish finished at the table. " s and it attached itself to potatoes most famously but to almost any vegetable that could be tossed in browned butter. String beans of the period were commonly boiled a good while before they reached the pan, though stringless varieties were already in circulation by the 1890s.