Home › The World's Kitchen › Potatoes, Bohemienne
Potatoes, Bohemienne
Peel, wash and drain six medium, raw potatoes. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and place on a roasting tin with six thin slices larding pork, one piece on each potato. Set in the oven to bake for thirty-five minutes, frequently turning them over meanwhile; remove, take each one between a towel and with the aid of an apple-corer scoop out lengthwise from one end to the other as you would apples. Skin three country sausages and with the meat carefully stuff the hollows of the six potatoes, close both sides of each potato with a piece of the scooped-out pieces of same, place in the same roasting pan and lightly butter the top of each with a very little melted butter. Place in the oven to bake for twenty minutes more, remove, dress on a hot dish, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve.
A straightforward two-stage bake: the potatoes are roasted whole under pork fat, then cored, stuffed with sausage meat and returned to the oven. Two things are unstated in the original — the oven temperature and how firm the potatoes should be before you core them.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Roast at 400F (200C); thirty-five minutes at that heat leaves a medium potato cooked through at the surface but still dense enough at the centre to hold its shape under the corer.
- Larding porkFresh pork fatback or unsmoked salt pork cut in thin sheets. Thick-cut streaky bacon is the practical substitute, though it will bring smoke and extra salt — cut the teaspoon of salt back if you use it.
- Country sausagesCoarse fresh pork sausage in a natural casing; the original gives no weight, so judge by what will fill six cored potatoes. Bulk breakfast sausage meat works and saves the skinning; avoid anything heavily sweetened or maple-flavoured, which sits oddly against the pork fat.
- The coringThis is the hinge. Let the potatoes cool for a few minutes before you take one in a towel, or the skin tears and the whole thing collapses. Push the corer straight through end to end in one pass rather than twisting back and forth, and keep the plugs — you need them as stoppers.
- Choice of potatoA firm yellow or waxy variety (Yukon Gold, Charlotte) holds a cored tunnel. A floury baking potato will crumble around the corer and the stuffing will burst out.
- Second bakeTwenty minutes at 400F is enough for a well-packed tunnel of sausage, but verify: the meat at the centre should reach 160F (71C). A very thick potato may need another five to ten minutes.
- YieldSix potatoes, one each — a supper dish or a substantial garnish for roast meat rather than a side for six.
- White pepperUsed here so no dark flecks show on pale potato. Black pepper will serve, though it is not simply a visual swap: the two differ somewhat in aroma as well as colour.
Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book with hundreds of short dishes labelled by nationality, and the labels often tell you more about restaurant naming conventions than about national cooking. In French kitchen usage à la bohémienne was commonly associated with paprika, tomato or rice — the associations French cooks attached to Hungary and to travelling Roma communities — though nothing in this dish answers to that description. The technique itself is plain hotel work: coring a partly baked potato with an apple corer and filling the tunnel with sausage meat turns two cheap ingredients into a plated dish, and the scooped-out plugs are reused as stoppers.