No. 2790

Potatoes Hollandaise with Melted Butter or Hollandaise Sauce

Pommes de Terre a la Hollandaise au Beurre Fondu ou a la Sauce Hollandaise

Cut potatoes into inch balls with a round vegetable spoon; cook them in salted water, and a few moments before they are finished drain off the water and cover with a damp cloth, then lay them in the oven for a few minutes; return to a saucepan and pour over slightly melted salty butter or else use a well-buttered Hollandaise sauce (No. 477).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A simple dish whose whole character rests on the drying step between boiling and buttering. Get that right and the rest is assembly.

The hinge: drying the ballsDraining, covering with a damp cloth and setting the pan in the oven for a few minutes drives off surface moisture so the butter clings instead of sliding off in a watery pool. Ranhofer gives no oven temperature and no timing beyond "a few minutes"; a moderate oven and a brief stay are all the text supports.
"A round vegetable spoon"This is a Parisienne scoop, the small end of a melon baller, roughly 1 inch across. Modern sets sell 20 mm and 25 mm heads; the larger is closer to Ranhofer's inch.
Potato choiceWaxy potatoes — Yukon Gold, red-skinned, fingerlings if large enough — hold their shape when scooped and simmered. Russets will crumble at the edges and lose the point of the exercise.
Undercook deliberately"A few moments before they are finished" means pulling them at the stage where a skewer meets slight resistance; the recipe gives no timing, so judge by feel. The short spell in the oven both dries them and takes them the rest of the way.
Salted butter"Slightly melted salty butter" means butter softened to the point of just breaking, not clarified and not browned. Use good salted butter and taste before adding more salt, since the cooking water was already salted.
The sauce cross-referenceNo. 477 is Ranhofer's hollandaise. "Well-buttered" signals a sauce on the richer side of the usual ratio; any standard hollandaise serves, held barely warm rather than hot, since direct heat risks splitting it.
YieldThe original gives none. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of potatoes before scooping for four servings — expect to lose a third or more of the flesh as trim, which is worth saving for soup or mash.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in numbered order — hence the long parade of potato entries, each a slight variation on cut, fat and sauce. "À la hollandaise" in nineteenth-century French kitchen usage generally meant either plain melted butter or the emulsified egg-and-butter sauce that took the same name, and Ranhofer's title hedges by offering both. The scooped-ball shape, more often labelled pommes parisienne, belongs to a period when a brigade had the labour to turn vegetables into uniform geometry as a matter of course; the wastage that a modern domestic cook resents was, in a hotel kitchen, simply stock and purée.