No. 2786

Potatoes, Parisienne

Pommes de Terre Parisienne

Cut them with a three-quarters of an inch diameter vegetable spoon; fry slowly in plenty of hot fat and when three-quarters done drain this off and lay them in a sautoir with clarified butter, toss, season with salt, sprinkle over with chopped parsley and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A short entry from Ranhofer that assumes you already own a Parisian scoop and know how to run a two-stage fry. The technique is the point: a slow first fry to cook the potato through, then a finish in butter.

The vegetable spoonThis is the Parisienne scoop, a small hemispherical cutter roughly 3/4 inch across, still sold under that name. A standard melon baller of the same diameter does the same job.
Potato choiceA firm, waxy or all-purpose potato holds the ball shape; a very floury baking potato tends to crumble at the edges when tossed. Scoop from large potatoes; the trim is usable for soup or puree.
"Fry slowly"The first fry is a blanching fry: moderate fat, not fiercely hot, until the balls are tender but barely coloured. Frying hot at this stage colours the outside before the centre cooks.
Three-quarters doneThe balls should yield to a knife tip with no browning worth speaking of. The two-stage structure means they can in principle be drained and held before the butter finish, though the recipe itself moves straight on.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow saute pan. Any wide heavy skillet works, but it needs enough surface that the balls sit in a single layer or they steam rather than colour.
Clarified butterSpecified because whole butter's milk solids burn at the heat needed to finish the browning. Ghee is closely related, though cooked further and nuttier; a neutral oil with a knob of butter added at the end is one substitute.
Seasoning orderSalt goes on in the pan, off the fat, and the parsley last so it stays green. Parsley added early in hot butter turns dark and tastes of nothing.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough working estimate, allow around 1 1/2 lb of potatoes before scooping for four as a garnish, since scooping wastes a large proportion of each potato.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house's working repertoire set down in print, which is why entries like this one are terse to the point of shorthand: they were written for cooks who already knew the drill. Pommes Parisienne belong to the long French tradition of naming potato preparations after their shape or their city, and the scoop that makes them is still called a Parisienne cutter. The two-stage fry described here, a slow blanching in fat followed by a finish in butter to order, is the same logic behind pommes frites and remains standard professional practice. As a garnish they were meant to sit alongside a roast or a saute rather than stand alone.