Home › Potatoes › Potato Balls
Potato Balls
Select large potatoes, wash, pare, and soak. Shape in balls with a French vegetable cutter. Cook in boiling salted water until soft; drain, and to one pint potatoes add one cup Thin White Sauce. Turn into hot dish, and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A simple garnish-grade side dish that lives or dies on the size of the balls and how gently they are handled once cooked. Everything else is white sauce.
- The French vegetable cutterThis is a parisienne scoop, sold today as a melon baller — a 1-inch head gives balls that cook evenly. Cut them all the same size or the small ones disintegrate while the large ones stay hard.
- Why soakSoaking pared potatoes in cold water keeps them from browning at the cut surfaces and rinses off loose starch, so the balls stay separate rather than gluing together in the pan. Half an hour is plenty.
- Cooking timeBalls this small are done in 6 to 10 minutes at a bare boil. "Until soft" in the original means tender to a skewer, not falling apart; a hard rolling boil will knock the corners off them.
- Thin White SauceThe book's thin sauce is roughly 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk, with salt and a little pepper. It should coat the balls, not pool under them.
- Combine off the heatFold the drained hot potatoes into the hot sauce with a rubber spatula and serve at once. Stirring them over a burner breaks them down and thickens the sauce with released starch.
- A pint of potatoesOne pint of balls is about 2 cups, which needs three or four large baking potatoes and serves three to four as a side. Keep the trimmings for mashed potatoes or soup — the waste here is considerable.
- Potato choiceA mealy russet gives the flouriest interior but is more fragile; a firmer, less starchy potato such as a red potato (Yukon Gold sits somewhere in between) holds its shape better under the scoop and in the water.
Potato balls belong to the late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for shaped vegetables, when a household's claim to refinement could rest on whether the potatoes arrived at the table in spheres rather than chunks. The tool itself is generally traced to French professional kitchens, where pommes parisiennes and other scooped garnishes were standard, and Fannie Farmer's book is full of such borrowings translated for American cooks with a single hired girl rather than a brigade. The white sauce is the other half of the period's logic: a thin flour-and-milk sauce was the all-purpose dressing of the Boston Cooking School, applied to potatoes, celery, onions and fish alike, and taught as a set of proportions to be memorized once and used everywhere.