Home › The World's Kitchen › Potatoes, Aux Fines Herbes
Potatoes, Aux Fines Herbes
Mix together in a bowl half teaspoon finely chopped chives, half teaspoon chopped parsley and half teaspoon finely chopped chervil. Boil in a quart water with a teaspoon salt one pint Parisian potatoes for fifteen minutes. Drain on a sieve, place in a frying pan, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, then add one and a half tablespoons melted butter and the chopped herbs; gently turn with a skimmer, while heating for a minute. Transfer into a hot, deep dish and serve.
A simple French side dish that depends almost entirely on the shape of the potato and the freshness of the herbs. Two of the original's measures need translating before you start.
- Parisian potatoesThese are balls cut from raw peeled potatoes with a parisienne scoop (melon baller), roughly 3/4 inch across. A firm, waxy potato holds the shape; a floury baking potato will crumble at the edges as it boils.
- A pint of potatoesThe pint here is a measure of volume, not weight — about 2 cups of scooped balls, on the order of three-quarters of a pound. Scooping wastes a good deal of each potato, so you will need noticeably more raw potato than that finished weight suggests. Serves three to four as a side.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is 1/2 teaspoon. That is assertive; start with half of it and adjust.
- Fifteen minutes is too longBalls this small are tender in 8 to 10 minutes in salted water. Fifteen minutes will leave the outsides sloughing off, which defeats the point of cutting them round. Test with a knife tip at eight.
- Dry them before the butterAfter draining, let the balls sit on the sieve a minute in their own steam so the surface dries. Butter clings to a dry potato and slides off a wet one.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh outside farmers' markets and it loses everything when dried. If you cannot find it, add a little more parsley plus a few tarragon leaves — tarragon is chervil's nearest relative in flavour, faintly anise, so use it sparingly.
- Herbs go in off the heatThe minute of heating in the pan is meant to coat, not to cook. Chives and chervil turn grey and grassy if they fry, so add them at the end and turn gently with a wide spoon or spatula.
Aux fines herbes is one of the standard French classical finishes — traditionally the quartet of parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon, chopped fine and added at the last moment so the volatile oils survive. The "Parisian" potato is the product of the parisienne cutter, a scoop that became a fixture of the professional French kitchen in the nineteenth century and gave restaurant cooks a way to turn a cheap root into uniform, elegant little spheres. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) is full of such garnishes; he had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, where the French repertoire was the house language, and the book's project was to put that vocabulary within reach of a domestic cook.