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Potatoes, Brabant
Peel, wash and cut into half-inch squares, four medium, sound potatoes, wash again and drain. Place them in a roasting pan, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, add three tablespoons melted lard, place them in the oven to bake for forty-five minutes, turning over once in a while. Remove, lift up with a skimmer, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A plain roasted-potato recipe that works as written; the only things worth fixing are the missing oven temperature and the heavy hand with pepper.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, as was common when ranges had no thermometer. For half-inch dice in forty-five minutes, use 425F, which browns the outsides before the centres dry out.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is reasonable for four potatoes, but half a teaspoon of pepper (the recipe does not say which kind) is about double what many modern palates will want. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the table.
- LardThree tablespoons of melted lard is a genuinely good choice here for flavour and browning; duck fat, beef dripping or a neutral high-smoke-point oil all substitute directly. Butter alone will scorch at this temperature.
- Dry the potatoesThe instruction to wash again and drain matters more than it looks. Surface starch and water steam the cubes instead of roasting them; pat them properly dry before they meet the fat.
- Pan and spacingA roasting pan wide enough to hold the cubes in a single layer is the hinge of the dish. Crowded potatoes release moisture and stew; use two pans if needed.
- Turning"Turning over once in a while" means two or three times with a spatula, not constant stirring, which knocks the crust off before it sets.
- SkimmerA skimmer is a flat perforated spoon, used here to lift the potatoes clear of the rendered fat pooled in the pan.
- YieldFour medium potatoes serve three to four as a side dish.
Dishes labelled Brabant in turn-of-the-century professional cookery refer to the old duchy straddling what is now Belgium and the southern Netherlands. Cubed potatoes roasted or fried in fat travelled widely under the name, and they are still familiar in New Orleans as Brabant potatoes, where they are usually parboiled and deep-fried. Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled from the repertoire of a Delmonico's man who set out to catalogue the world's cooking dish by dish, and entries like this one show how much of that repertoire was simple hotel-kitchen groundwork given a geographical label.