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Hongroise Potatoes
Wash, pare, and cut potatoes in one-third inch cubes, - there should be three cups; parboil three minutes, and drain. Add one-third cup butter, and cook on back of range until potatoes are soft and slightly browned. Melt two tablespoons butter, add a few drops onion juice, two tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one cup hot milk. Season with salt and paprika, then add one egg yolk. Pour sauce over potatoes, and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A Fannie Farmer-era side dish: sautéed potato cubes finished with a paprika cream sauce. The whole thing hangs on cooking the potatoes gently enough that they colour without breaking apart.
- "Back of the range"On a coal or wood range the back was the cool zone. Translate it as medium-low on a gas or electric burner, in a heavy skillet, with occasional turning rather than constant stirring so the cubes brown on their faces.
- QuantityThree cups of one-third-inch cubes is roughly 1 to 1¼ lb of potatoes, pared. Use a waxy or all-purpose variety; a floury baker will slump into mash once parboiled and then fried.
- The parboilThree minutes in boiling water is a blanch, not a cooking (the recipe does not say whether to salt it). Drain thoroughly and let the surface steam dry for a minute or the butter will spit and the cubes will steam instead of browning.
- One-third cup butterThat is about 5⅓ tablespoons for a pound of potatoes — generous by current taste. Half that amount browns them perfectly well; the sauce brings more butter along with it.
- Onion juicePeriod cooks grated an onion and used the expressed liquid to get flavour without visible pieces. Grate a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and press out a few drops, or substitute a very small pinch of onion powder.
- The egg yolkThis is the hinge. Take the finished white sauce off the heat, temper the yolk with a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce, then stir it back in and keep the pan below a simmer. Boiling after the yolk goes in will curdle it into threads.
- PaprikaThe recipe gives no quantity, only 'season with salt and paprika.' 'Hongroise' means simply 'Hungarian,' and in practice signals paprika; a sweet Hungarian paprika suits it. Note that the recipe adds it with the salt after the milk, not to the butter and flour.
- YieldServes four as a side. Sauce it just before serving; the potatoes soften and the sauce skins over if it stands.
Anything labelled à la hongroise in a turn-of-the-century American or French-influenced kitchen generally meant paprika and cream, the two things Western cooks had settled on as shorthand for Hungarian cooking as Hungarian paprika became more widely known outside Hungary over the course of the nineteenth century. Cookbooks of this period are full of such borrowed French menu tags — Lyonnaise, Duchesse, Hongroise — attached to potatoes above all. The egg yolk finish marks it as a sauce in the older French manner, a liaison rather than a plain white sauce, and it is a small sign of how thoroughly cooking schools of the period taught technique borrowed from professional kitchens to women cooking for their own families.