No. 2775

Potatoes, Bordelaise—New

Pommes de Terre Nouvelles a la Bordelaise

Select small, uniform-sized new potatoes; rub the peelings off with a cloth and saute them in lard, keeping the pan covered until done and of a fine color, then drain and saute in butter with a little chopped shallot, a trifle of garlic, salt and fine herbs. In case there be no new potatoes, pare old ones into olive forms, wash and boil partly in salted water, then drain and finish cooking in butter the same as the new ones.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A two-fat method: lard for the initial covered saute that cooks the potatoes through, butter for the finish that carries the shallot, garlic and herbs. Ranhofer's brevity hides the sequence, so keep it straight.

The hinge is the covered panSauteing new potatoes with the lid on steams and browns them at once, which is why no separate boiling is needed. Keep the heat moderate and shake the pan every few minutes; small new potatoes want 20 to 25 minutes this way.
Rubbing off the peelGenuinely new potatoes have skins thin enough to come away under a coarse cloth or a scouring pad after a brief soak. Anything sold as "new" in a supermarket in midwinter will need a light scrape with a knife instead.
Olive formsOlive forms — The fallback for old potatoes is tourné: pare each piece to a small barrel about the size of a large olive, faceted by convention into seven sides. The point is uniform cooking, not decoration, so evenness matters more than the facet count.
Partly boil means parboilFive to seven minutes in salted water, until the outside yields but the center is still firm. Drain and let the steam dry off before they go into the butter or they will not color.
LardRendered leaf lard is still sold and behaves exactly as intended here. Clarified butter, duck fat or a neutral oil all substitute; whole butter will not, since the milk solids burn over the long covered cooking.
Fine herbsFine herbs — Fines herbes classically means parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, chopped fine and added at the very end, though nineteenth-century kitchens used the phrase loosely. Parsley alone is defensible; anything added early will blacken in the butter.
A trifle of garlicBordelaise garnishes are shallot-forward with garlic in the background. For 2 lb of potatoes, one large shallot and a half clove of garlic, both minced, is the balance implied.
YieldFigure 2 lb of potatoes for four as a side dish. Season with salt at the butter stage, not in the lard, where it draws moisture and hinders browning.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's across two spells, roughly 1862-76 and 1879-96, and The Epicurean (1894) is his working catalogue rather than a book for home cooks, which is why the entry assumes you already know what an olive form and fines herbes are. "À la bordelaise" is one of the loosest of the regional French labels: applied to a sauce it means red wine, shallot and marrow, but on vegetables and potatoes it generally signals nothing more than shallot, garlic and parsley cooked in fat. The distinction Ranhofer draws between new and old potatoes reflects a genuinely seasonal market. With potatoes held in cold cellars, thin-skinned early potatoes were available for a few weeks in late spring and early summer, and the tourné-and-parboil method is his year-round substitute for a texture he could otherwise only serve briefly.