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Potato Balls, Persillade
Boil six neatly peeled, medium potatoes in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt for thirty minutes. Drain well. Press through a potato masher into a bowl, add half teaspoon chopped parsley, half teaspoon chopped chervil, two egg yolks, half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Briskly stir with wooden spoon two minutes. Roll out the puree on a lightly floured table to twelve even balls. Dip in beaten egg, lightly roll in bread crumbs, place in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat six minutes. Take up, arrange on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A straightforward potato croquette from the era when a deep-fry basket and a folded napkin were standard equipment. Two things decide whether these hold together: dry potatoes and a cool mixture.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the pepper here is about half a teaspoon and the nutmeg a scant quarter — assertive but not unreasonable for twelve balls.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. Weight rather than spoon measure is what this style of professional recipe writing tends to use; the pre-marked American butter stick, with its tablespoon divisions printed on the wrapper, belongs to a later period.
- Dry the potatoesThe hinge of the dish. After draining, return the potatoes to the empty hot pan for a minute or two over low heat to drive off steam before mashing. Wet purée will not roll, and the balls burst in the fat.
- Let the mixture coolThe yolks are the binder and they set only in the fryer. Shaping and crumbing a hot purée gives you slumped balls and crumbs that slide off; chill the seasoned purée until firm, then roll, egg and crumb.
- Thirty minutes of boilingCorrect only for whole medium potatoes. Quartered, they are done in 15 to 20. Waxy potatoes will give a gluey purée — use a floury variety such as russet.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil in the way water does; the phrase means the fat is at frying heat, somewhere in the usual deep-frying range of roughly 350-375F. At that heat six minutes is generous -- the interior is already cooked, so they can be pulled once deep gold, which may be only three to four minutes.
- The frying basketThe recipe calls for one, though crumbed items can stick to the wires and tear; lowering them in with a spider or slotted spoon, a few at a time so the fat holds its heat, is one way round that.
- ChervilStill sold fresh in some markets and easy to grow, but rarely stocked. Its flavour is parsley with a faint anise note; a little tarragon plus extra parsley is the usual stand-in. Dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- Yield and serviceTwelve balls, enough for four as a side. The folded napkin on the platter absorbed frying fat; a paper-lined dish does the same job.
The name is French: persillade comes from persil, parsley, and in kitchen use denotes a chopped-parsley preparation, commonly with garlic. These are potato croquettes of the sort that filled the garnish sections of professional kitchens around 1900, where a purée bound with yolks could be shaped, crumbed and fried to order all through service. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, drew The International Cook Book from that repertoire, and many of its entries read as line-cook shorthand -- precise on quantities and frying times, silent on why anything is done. The folded napkin on the serving dish is a period habit, common in hotel and restaurant cookery of the day for presenting fried food.