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Potatoes and Onions Sauted
Take an equal amount of small new potatoes and onions of equal size, peel them and place them in a sautepan, with a good sized lump of butter, tossing them over the fire for a quarter of an hour being careful they do not burn; put in water to about half the height of the vegetables, add a little salt and pepper, place the lid over the pan, and stew gently for half an hour; then squeeze in a little lemon juice, turn onto a hot dish, and serve.
A straightforward braise-in-a-pan dish that depends entirely on the vegetables being genuinely small and genuinely matched in size. Everything else follows from that.
- Size is the hingePotatoes and onions cook at different rates, so the recipe depends on both being small and matched, as the text specifies; something in the region of 1 to 1.5 inches across works. Larger onions will tend to fall apart before larger potatoes are tender. Rather than halving or quartering, buy smaller.
- What "new potatoes" meansFreshly lifted, thin-skinned waxy potatoes that hold their shape. Modern equivalents are creamers, fingerlings or small red-skinned potatoes. Russets will disintegrate in the stewing stage.
- The onionsSmall boiling onions, cipollini or pearl onions. Peeling them is easier after a 30-second blanch in boiling water and a plunge into cold.
- "A good sized lump of butter"For about 2 lb of vegetables total, 3 to 4 tablespoons. Enough to coat everything glossily without pooling.
- The first quarter hourFifteen minutes in butter both colours and partly cooks the vegetables. The recipe's only stated concern is that they do not burn, so keep the heat medium-low and toss often; butter browns fast around onion sugars, so drop the heat rather than rush it.
- Water levelHalf the height of the vegetables works out at somewhere around a cup or more in a 10-inch pan, depending on how tightly they sit. It should reduce to a buttery glaze by the end; if the pan runs dry early, add a splash of water rather than more butter.
- Half an hour, checkedThirty minutes suits potatoes of about 1.5 inches. Start testing at 20 with a knife tip — you want them yielding but not splitting.
- The lemonThe recipe adds it at the very end, just before turning out; taking the pan off the heat first will keep it brighter. A half lemon is plenty; the point is to cut the butter, not to make the dish taste of citrus.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of vegetables serves four as a side dish.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book is less a personal manifesto than a vast compendium of the classical French-American repertoire a large hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand. A dish like this belongs to the plain end of that repertoire: it might reasonably be classed as a pommes de terre à l'étuvée, vegetables sweated in butter and finished in their own steam, a technique that runs straight through nineteenth-century French practice. The pairing of new potatoes and small onions may well have followed seasonal logic as much as culinary. The squeeze of lemon at the end is the professional touch, acid added last to lift a dish that is otherwise all butter and starch.