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Pommes Parisienne En Mayonaise
Parisian potatoes are so called when scooped out of large potatoes with a scoop which forms them in balls of the size and appearance of white cherries, or a little larger or smaller, for the scoops are sold of different sizes. 1. Make the mayonaise sauce in the quick way with bowl and egg-beater, directed in the beginning of this book, and add a tablespoonful of made mustard and a very little cayenne.
Scoop out about two quarts of Parisienne potatoes, set them on to boil in cold mik and water with a little salt in it, and take them off when just done, before they break out of shape. Drain in a colander and set away to get cold. Also scoop out about a cupful of cooked blood beets, to match the potatoes, and cover the beet balls with vinegar.
Just before dinner set out from 15 to 25 small flat dishes (for the probable orders of 50 persons with a varied bill to choose from). Place a spoonful of mayonaise in a pan or bowl and shake the potatoes about in it to coat them. Pile 8 or 9 in each dish, draw a spoonful of mayonaise over so as to mask them, and finish by placing with two forks 3 or 4 of the beet balls around for ornament. 2. Large dishes can be put up in the same general way, the beets may then be placed in a row or two diagonally across the top, as well, and some parsley added, giving the effect of a wreath of berries. 3. It is worth while to know that when the potatoes are of a mealy sort that break in the water they are better simmered till done in fresh butter, first melted and poured off the salt sediment, but not made frying hot. The potatoes are not to be allowed to become in the least brown, nor even to have a hard skin fried on them; only gently stewed in butter. The butter can afterwards be used for frying, etc. 4. Instead of repeating, the next time use the allemande salad dressing, which, if made with uncolored butter, is pearl white, and ornament with parsley, and a few capers on top, or pickled nasturtium seeds or pods, or some pickled red cabbage chopped and drained from its vinegar, the beets in this case being left out.
A hotel garde-manger recipe scaled for a dining room of fifty, written for a cook who could turn out potato balls by the quart. It reduces cleanly, but two or three of the instructions need translating.
- The hinge: pull the potatoes earlyScooped balls hold their shape only if they come out of the liquid the moment a skewer meets slight resistance, which at a bare simmer is a matter of only a few minutes. Once they break they cannot be masked into looking right, and the salad turns to a stiff potato mash under sauce.
- The scoopA Parisienne scoop is what is now sold as a melon baller; the 22–25 mm size gives the "white cherry" the text describes. Waxy potatoes (Yukon Gold, red-skinned, fingerling) are the right choice, which also makes step 3's butter method unnecessary.
- Quantities and yieldTwo quarts of scooped balls, plated 8 or 9 to a dish, covers the 15 to 25 dishes the text calls for, the author reckoning that only a third to a half of fifty diners will order it. For four people, scoop from about 1 1/2 to 2 lb of large potatoes (expect to lose roughly half the weight as trim) and use about half a cup of mayonnaise.
- "Blood beets"Simply deep-red beets, as opposed to the pale and yellow sorts then still common in markets. Any ordinary red beet works; cook until tender, cool, then scoop, and let the balls sit in vinegar at least an hour so they hold their color rather than bleeding into the sauce.
- "Made mustard"Prepared mustard from the jar, not dry mustard powder. Any smooth prepared mustard will do; a French mustard of the Dijon type is a reasonable stand-in.
- Butter "poured off the salt sediment"Melt butter, let it settle, and pour off the clear fat, leaving the milky salted residue behind — clarified butter, which will not scorch or salt-crust the potatoes. Keep it well below frying heat so the balls stew rather than fry, exactly as the text insists.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseThe "quick way with bowl and egg-beater" is an uncooked emulsion. Use pasteurized eggs or pasteurized liquid egg if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished salad refrigerated; a hotel line plated these to order and they did not sit out.
- Allemande dressingNot the classic hot allemande sauce but a pale cold dressing in the manner of this book's own recipe — worth turning back to it, since the point of the variation is its pearl-white color against green parsley and capers.
- ServingAssemble no more than an hour ahead and hold cold, and give the plated dishes a few minutes out of the refrigerator before they go to table.
Pommes Parisienne belong to the ornamental French service that ran American hotel and restaurant kitchens in the late nineteenth century, when a cook's standing rested partly on knife and scoop work: identical spheres of potato, turnip and beet, cut by hand from vegetables that were otherwise cheap, signalled a kitchen with labor to spare. The name appears to attach to the shape rather than to any dish from Paris, and the text itself notes that the scoops were sold in different sizes. The setup here — 15 to 25 small flat dishes prepared in advance against "the probable orders of 50 persons with a varied bill to choose from" — is a candid look at how à la carte service was actually managed, with the garde-manger guessing demand and plating cold salads ahead of the rush. That the author bothers to note which potatoes break in water, and offers a butter-stewed alternative, suggests he was writing for cooks working with whatever the market sent, long before varieties were labelled waxy or mealy at the point of sale.