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Potatoes à la Hollandaise
Wash, pare, soak, and cut potatoes in one-fourth inch slices, shape with French vegetable cutters; or cut in onehalf inch cubes. Cover three cups potato with White Stock, cook until soft, and drain. Cream one-third cup butter, add one tablespoon lemon juice, one-half teaspoon salt, and few grains of cayenne. Add to potatoes, cook three minutes, and add one-half tablespoon finely chopped parsley.
A simple potato dish whose only difficulty is the finish: the butter is added off the boil and barely warmed through, so it stays as a creamy coating rather than breaking into oil and water.
- The hinge — keep the butter emulsion intactFarmer says only "cook three minutes" and gives no heat level, but low heat is the safest reading — barely a shiver of steam, the pan shaken rather than stirred. A hard boil after the butter goes in will split it and leave the potatoes greasy in a thin lemony pool.
- White StockIn this book a light stock from knuckle of veal with fowl, unbrowned rather than dark — though Farmer's own version does carry salt and peppercorns, so it is not strictly unseasoned. A mild low-sodium chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily salted, since the potatoes absorb it as they cook and the salt is added again later.
- "Cream one-third cup butter"This means beating softened butter until light, then working in the lemon juice, salt and cayenne — essentially a compound butter. It is not melted first. Roughly 5 1/3 tablespoons, or 75 g.
- Soaking the potatoesThe recipe gives no time. Soaking pared potatoes in cold water was routine in this period, both to keep them from discolouring and to rinse off surface starch so the slices hold their shape; a short soak will do, and drain them well before they go into the stock.
- French vegetable cuttersThese were small tin stamps for cutting rounds, ovals and fluted shapes from potato slices. Half-inch cubes, as the recipe allows, are the sensible modern choice, or use a melon baller for spheres.
- Cooking timeHalf-inch cubes in simmering stock are tender in 10 to 12 minutes. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock — overcooked cubes collapse when the butter is folded in.
- Save the cooking liquidThe drained stock is now potato-thickened and well flavoured; keep it for a soup or a sauce rather than pouring it away.
- YieldThree cups of raw potato serves four as a side dish. It does not reheat well; the butter separates.
The name attaches to the Dutch by way of French kitchen usage, where à la hollandaise generally signals butter and lemon; hollandaise sauce, likewise, takes its name from a Dutch association rather than from its ingredients. Boiled potatoes tossed in butter with parsley are genuinely a Netherlands staple, and nineteenth-century French and English cookery books used the label loosely for almost any vegetable finished that way. What makes this version characteristic of Fannie Farmer's 1896 school book is the elaboration of the method: potatoes cooked in veal stock rather than water, stamped into decorative shapes with a set of tin cutters, and finished with a creamed compound butter. The dishes the Boston Cooking School taught were modelled on the multi-course dinner service of the period, where even a potato garnish was expected to look deliberate.