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Potatoes, Bearnaise
Peel and wash three large, sound potatoes. Cut them into quarter-inch-square pieces, wash again and drain, then plunge in boiling fat and fry for six minutes. Lift them up, drain and place in a frying pan with one tablespoon butter. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; gently toss them, then brown to a nice colour for ten minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile; then add half a bean finely chopped, sound garlic and half teaspoon finely chopped parsley; toss while cooking for three minutes more and serve.
A straightforward twice-cooked potato finished with garlic and parsley. Nothing here is obsolete except the vocabulary and one confusing phrase.
- "Half a bean" of garlicAlmost certainly a literal rendering of the French gousse, which means a pod as well as a clove of garlic. Read it as half a clove, finely chopped, which for three potatoes is restrained; a full clove is more in keeping with the name.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is a half teaspoon — a generous but deliberate amount against a half teaspoon of salt.
- Quarter-inch diceCut evenly and keep to the size given. Larger cubes may not cook through in the six-minute blanch and can stay firm in the middle through the butter stage.
- The second wash mattersRinsing after cutting removes surface starch so the cubes fry separately instead of gluing into a cake. Drain and dry them well before they go near hot fat, or the fat will boil over.
- Frying fat temperatureThe first fry reads as a blanch rather than a browning: six minutes, until the potato is tender and barely coloured. The colour comes later, in butter.
- Butter and the browning stageTen minutes of tossing in one tablespoon of butter over moderate heat is what builds the crust. Use a wide pan so the cubes sit in one layer; crowded, they steam and stay pale. Add a little oil with the butter if it threatens to darken.
- Garlic goes in last for a reasonThree minutes at the end is all it gets. Chopped garlic dropped into a pan at the start of a ten-minute browning turns bitter and black long before the potatoes are done.
- YieldThree large potatoes serves three or four as a side dish. Serve immediately — the crust softens within a few minutes of leaving the pan.
The name points not to the sauce but to the province: à la béarnaise, in the manner of Béarn in southwestern France, where garlic and parsley are a common finish for fried potatoes. That pairing, chopped together, is the persillade of French cooking, and it is often used on sautéed potatoes like these. The doubling of the cooking — a blanch in fat, then a separate browning in butter — is the same principle behind the modern twice-fried chip. That the book preserves the awkward translation "half a bean" of garlic suggests a French professional recipe rendered into English with the technical vocabulary carried over more faithfully than the idiom.