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Potatoes, Anglaise
Boil in two quarts water with one tablespoon salt six medium-sized peeled potatoes for thirty-five minutes. Drain, cut them in halves and place in a sautoire. Season them with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon white pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix gently with a fork. Dress on a hot dish; spread a very little lightly melted butter over each piece. Besprinkle with half teaspoon finely chopped parsley and serve very hot.
A plain boiled potato dressed with butter, nutmeg and parsley. The only real pitfall is the boiling time, which will reduce most modern potatoes to mush.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning here is half a teaspoon salt, a quarter teaspoon each white pepper and grated nutmeg for six potatoes.
- SautoireA sautoire is a wide, straight-sided shallow pan — what most kitchens now call a sauté pan. It is used here only as a warm vessel for tossing, not for frying.
- Thirty-five minutes is too longMedium waxy potatoes, whole and peeled, are done in 20-25 minutes; test with a skewer from about 18 minutes. The longer time may reflect larger or denser storage potatoes. Overboiled potatoes waterlog and break apart when you try to halve them.
- Choose a waxy potatoThe dish depends on the halves holding their shape under a fork. Red-skinned and other waxy varieties hold, as will a medium-starch potato such as Yukon Gold; a floury russet will collapse.
- Dry them before seasoningAfter draining, return the potatoes to the hot empty pan off the heat for a minute so surface water steams off. Butter and nutmeg cling to a dry potato and slide off a wet one.
- The nutmegGrate it fresh at the moment of use. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma and at this quantity — a quarter teaspoon across six potatoes — there is nothing else to hide behind.
- Salt the water properlyOne tablespoon in two quarts is on the light side; many modern recipes call for roughly double that.
- YieldSix potatoes, halved, serves four to six as a side.
"Anglaise" in a French professional kitchen vocabulary means, roughly, done the English way — which in the case of vegetables means plainly boiled in salted water and finished with butter, as against the sauced and glazed treatments given the same vegetable elsewhere on the menu. The International Cook Book (Alexander Filippini, 1906) carries many recipes named for national and regional styles, and this entry stands beside potatoes Parisienne, Lyonnaise, Duchesse and the rest. Filippini worked for years at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe carries the marks of a professional kitchen: seasoning measured out in saltspoons, a named pan, and the instruction to serve very hot.