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Potato Balls
Mash thoroughly a pound of boiled potatoes and rub them through a wire sieve and mix in with them a quarter of a pound of grated ham, a little chopped parsley and a small onion chopped very fine, together with a small quantity of nutmeg, grated, and the beaten yolks of two eggs. Roll this mixture into balls of equal size, flour and egg-breadcrumb them, then fry in dripping or brown them in the oven, serving them on a hot dish.
Potatoes, Barigoule Place in a saucepan with enough broth to cover them ten peeled and washed potatoes and boil them gently until they become quite tender, then drain, taking care not to break them. Next put a teacupful of olive oil into a deep fryingpan, and place over the fire until hot, then put in the potatoes, tossing them gently until they are lightly browned all over. Place them on a dish and sprinkle salt and pepper, and vinegar all over them, serving them hot.
Two potato dishes run together in the original text: a croquette-style fried ball, and a boiled-then-fried potato finished with vinegar. Both are straightforward, but the measures and the browning instructions need translating.
- Dry the potatoes firstThe hinge of the potato balls is moisture. Boil the potatoes whole in their skins, peel while hot, and let the mash steam dry in the pan for a minute before sieving; wet mash will not hold a ball and will burst in the fat.
- A pound of potatoesAbout 450 g, roughly two large russets, yielding some 2 cups of mash. With the ham and yolks this should make around a dozen balls, enough for four as a side.
- Grated hamA quarter pound (115 g) of firm dry-cured or boiled ham, grated on the coarse side of a box grater rather than diced. Deli ham sliced thin is too wet; ask for a single thick piece.
- Egg-breadcrumb themStandard three-stage breading: flour, beaten whole egg, then fine dry crumbs. Chilling the breaded balls 20-30 minutes before frying keeps them from splitting.
- DrippingRendered beef or pork fat, still sold and worth using for flavour; any neutral oil at 350-375F works. If browning in the oven instead, roll the balls in melted fat and bake at 425F until crisp, turning once.
- A teacupful of olive oilA teacupful is not a fixed measure; period teacups are generally reckoned somewhere between about 4 and 6 fl oz, so half to three-quarters of a cup. This is shallow-frying, not deep-frying; the potatoes are tossed rather than submerged.
- Ten potatoesNo size is given. Small waxy potatoes of even size, around 2 inches, hold together best through the boiling and the tossing; large floury ones will collapse when moved in the pan.
- Vinegar at the endAdd it off the heat, sparingly - a tablespoon or so of red wine vinegar for ten potatoes. It is a seasoning here, meant to cut the oil, not a dressing.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, where potatoes appeared in dozens of named variations, each a small permutation of boiling, mashing, frying and garnish. The potato balls are a croquette in all but name, of the sort that let a kitchen use up the previous day's boiled potatoes and ham trimmings and send them out looking new. Barigoule is borrowed from the Provencal artichoke dish artichauts a la barigoule, the name generally traced to a local word for a mushroom the trimmed artichoke was thought to resemble; by the time it reached hotel menus it seems to have loosened into something closer to a general label for something cooked with olive oil in the southern manner, which is all it appears to mean here.