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Potatoes, Peasant Style
3 cups potatoes
2 tablespoons flour
6 tablespoons bacon fat
2 cups milk
2 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons parsley
⅛ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon paprika
Wash, pare and cut potatoes in dice. Fry in fat until brown. Remove potatoes and fry the chopped garlic and parsley in the fat remaining in the pan. Add flour, milk and seasonings, and cook until thickened (about five minutes). Add potatoes and cook three minutes.
A potato hash finished in a garlic-parsley white sauce built on bacon fat. The only real trap is the sauce breaking or tasting raw of flour, and the potatoes going soft once they go back in.
- YieldThree cups of diced raw potato is roughly 1 to 1.25 lb, about three medium potatoes. Serves four as a side.
- Six tablespoons of fatThat is a generous but deliberate amount: the potatoes fry in it, and what remains becomes the roux for two cups of milk. Two tablespoons of fat to two of flour is the correct proportion for the sauce, so pour off the excess after browning rather than building the roux in all of it.
- Brown the potatoes properlyDiced raw potato needs 15 to 20 minutes over medium heat in a wide pan, turned only occasionally. Crowding steams them. If you want certainty, parboil the dice 5 minutes and dry them well before frying.
- Garlic and parsley timingTwo cloves in hot bacon fat scorch in under a minute and turn bitter. Drop the heat before they go in, and add the parsley with the flour rather than before it.
- Cook the flourThe five minutes given for thickening assumes the roux has already lost its raw taste. Stir flour into the fat for a full minute before the milk goes in, then add the milk gradually and whisk.
- The final three minutesKeep it at a bare simmer and do not stir hard. The point is to coat the potatoes, not to mash them; a longer sit in the sauce softens the crust you just built.
- PaprikaHere almost certainly the mild sweet kind, used largely for colour. Half a teaspoon is a tint, not a flavour; smoked paprika would be a different dish.
- If you have no bacon fatButter with a couple of chopped bacon rashers rendered in it gets close. Plain oil works for the frying but leaves the sauce flat, since bacon fat is carrying most of the savour here.
Butterick, a pattern company, published its recipe book for the same audience it sold dress patterns to. "Peasant style" — a la paysanne — was a menu tag of the period, generally understood to mean rustic and built from cheap staples rather than any single regional recipe. Browning in rendered pork fat and finishing in a milk sauce is one way potatoes were stretched into a meal in northern Europe.