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Brabant Potatoes
Prepare same as for Boiled Potatoes, using small potatoes, and trim egg-shaped; parboil ten minutes, drain, and place in baking-pan and bake until soft, basting three times with melted butter.
A short cross-referenced recipe of the kind Fannie Farmer used constantly: the method lives under "Boiled Potatoes," and this entry only tells you what to do differently. Everything hinges on the parboil being brief and the potatoes going into the oven with their surfaces dry.
- What "prepare same as for Boiled Potatoes" meansIn the boiled-potato recipe the potatoes are washed and pared and held in cold water until wanted, so they do not discolor. Beyond that preparation, the boiling directions there appear to be superseded by the ten-minute parboil given here.
- Trimming egg-shapedClose to what a modern kitchen calls tourné: shallow facets pared with a small knife (usually reckoned at seven) until the potato is a smooth oval. Uniform size matters more than elegance, since the parboil is timed rather than tested.
- Potato choiceUse small waxy or all-purpose potatoes about 2 inches long — new potatoes, Yukon Gold, or fingerlings. A very starchy baking potato will crumble at the edges once the facets are pared away.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 400°F; hot enough to brown the butter-basted surface, not so hot that the outsides color before the centers give way.
- Dry them before they go inAfter draining the parboil, let the potatoes stand a minute or two in the hot empty pan so surface moisture steams off. Wet potatoes will not take on color no matter how much butter you brush over them.
- Timing and bastingReckon on 25 to 35 minutes depending on size, with the three bastings spaced through that time. Done means a skewer slides in without resistance and the outside is golden.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of small potatoes serves four as a side. Serve promptly -- the browned buttered surface softens quickly once out of the oven.
The name points to Brabant, the old duchy straddling what is now Belgium and the southern Netherlands, and in nineteenth-century cookery "à la brabançonne" was one of the many regional labels French kitchens attached to garnishes and potato treatments. In American books of Fannie Farmer's era such names were largely decorative: what mattered to her readers was the technique, and the technique here — parboil, dry, then roast with repeated basting — is the standard route to a potato that is fluffy inside with a browned buttered exterior, without the risk of an oven-roasted raw potato scorching before it cooks through. That the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives the potato so much attention at all tells you how central it was to a plain New England table and how much variety a cook was expected to wring from one cheap ingredient.