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Persillade Potatoes
Wash and pare small potatoes, and cut in shapes of large olives. Cook in boiling salted water until soft. Drain, and let stand to dry off. Turn into hot serving dish, pour over clarified butter, sprinkle generously with paprika, and send to table at once.
A simple boiled potato dressed at the table, from the era when shaping vegetables by hand was ordinary kitchen work. Two things carry the dish: the drying step and the butter.
- The hinge is the dryingAfter draining, leave the potatoes in the hot empty pan over low heat, or spread on a warm tray, for a minute or two until the surfaces go matte. Wet potatoes will bead the butter off instead of taking it up.
- Turning the shapes"Cut in shapes of large olives" means turning the potatoes to a small barrel shape, in the manner of the tournée: conventionally five to seven flat facets, here at olive size rather than the larger château cut. A small paring knife works better than a peeler. The point is uniform size so they cook evenly; equal-sized small potatoes halved will do the same job.
- Clarified butterMelt butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milky solids behind. Roughly 3 oz butter yields somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 oz clarified. Whole melted butter works but the water in it dulls the shine.
- Choose a waxy potatoTurned shapes need a potato that holds its edges. Red Bliss and new potatoes hold up best (Yukon Gold is intermediate but workable); a russet will fray and collapse at the corners.
- Don't boil hardA rolling boil knocks the facets off. Bring to a boil, then hold at a bare simmer until a knife slides in with no resistance; at olive size this may take only about 10 to 15 minutes, so start testing early.
- PaprikaTurn-of-the-century paprika was mild and used largely for color. Sweet Hungarian paprika is the closest match; hot or smoked varieties will take the dish somewhere else entirely.
- The missing parsleyA persillade is a parsley preparation, and the name implies chopped parsley in or over the butter, though this version omits it. Adding a tablespoon of finely chopped flat-leaf parsley to the butter brings the dish in line with its title.
- YieldRoughly 1.5 lb of potatoes before turning, allowing for a third or more lost in trimming, serves four as a side. The recipe itself gives no quantity.
Persillade is simply the French for a parsley dressing, usually parsley chopped with garlic and worked into butter or oil. The turned potato — cut to a uniform faceted barrel — belongs to the same borrowing of French professional vocabulary: it was a hotel and restaurant technique. That the recipe drops the parsley and reaches for paprika instead is of a piece with the period's fondness for paprika as a milder, prettier alternative to cayenne.