No. 2815

Purslain, Green or Golden a la Barbancon

Pourpier Vert ou Dore a la Barbancon

Clean three pounds of the golden purslain; blanch in salted boiling water, drain and finish cooking in some good blond veal stock (No. 423), thickening with a little kneaded butter (No. 579), and adding four ounces of lean cooked ham cut in squares. Dish it up and garnish around with small tartlets prepared in the following manner: Cook some of the purslain in salted water after it has been cleaned; drain and press out all the liquid, then fry it in butter, season and add bred-crumbs and raw egg-yolks. Line some round tartlet molds with thin puff paste (No. 146), fill them with the preparation, strew over grated parmesan and cook in a moderate oven; turn them out to range around the purslain, laying between each one a small marinated purslain stalk dipped in light frying batter (No. 137) and fried to a fine color.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade and a stockpot already going; the dish is really two preparations, a buttered stew of purslane and a ring of cheese tartlets made from the same green. Everything hinges on not overcooking the leaves, which collapse to slime if pushed.

Purslane, and how muchGolden purslane is the yellow-leaved cultivar of Portulaca oleracea, sold at farmers' markets and Middle Eastern and Mexican groceries as verdolagas; common green purslane works identically. Three pounds untrimmed cooks down drastically, so the stewed portion serves about six as a side.
Blanching timeSalted boiling water for one to two minutes only, then drain well. The stems are mucilaginous and long boiling turns the whole dish gluey; the finishing in stock is where the cooking actually completes, in another three or four minutes.
Blond veal stockNo. 423 is Ranhofer's blond veal stock, a pale stock rather than a dark brown one. A good unsalted veal or light chicken stock stands in; avoid dark brown stock, which overwhelms a vegetable this delicate.
Kneaded butterNo. 579 is kneaded butter, beurre manié: soft butter and flour, conventionally in roughly equal weights, worked to a paste and whisked into the simmering liquid in small pieces. Start with about a tablespoon of each for a cup of stock and add more only if the sauce does not coat.
The hamFour ounces of lean cooked ham in small dice. Ranhofer means a mild boiled ham, not a dry-cured prosciutto, which would salt the sauce past recovery.
Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350°F. Blind-baking is not called for; the tartlets go in filled, and 20 to 25 minutes should set the raw yolk in the filling and color the parmesan.
Tartlet fillingPress the cooked purslane genuinely dry before frying it in butter, otherwise the crumbs and yolk will not bind. Roughly two tablespoons of fresh breadcrumbs and one yolk per cup of packed cooked greens gives a mixture that holds its shape.
The fried stalks"Marinated" here most likely means a short soak in oil, lemon or vinegar, salt and pepper before the stalks are dipped in batter. Thicker stems only; leaf-heavy sprigs shed in the fryer. No. 137 is Ranhofer's light frying batter, and the oil should be around 350°F.
AssemblyThe tartlets and stalks are garnish and go on at the last moment. Both go soft within minutes of meeting the sauce, so plate the stew first and range them around the edge just before service.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its vegetable chapters are a useful reminder of how much wider the American market garden once was. Purslane, a succulent that grows as a weed across most of the temperate world, was a normal salad and pot-herb in Europe and colonial America long before it was written off as something to pull out of the path; it appears in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century seed lists and kitchen gardens, and the golden form was grown specifically for the table. The name "à la Barbancon" belongs to the vast nineteenth-century vocabulary of garnish names in French professional cooking, generally traced to noble houses or diners rather than to any technique, and like most of them it signals a fixed presentation — here the ring of tartlets and the fried stalks — rather than a flavor. That a plate of purslane merited puff-paste tartlets and parmesan tells you plainly how Delmonico's treated vegetables: never plain, always dressed for the dining room.