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Potatoes, Chassepot
Peel three large, sound, raw potatoes. Cut them into cartridge shape one and a half inches long. Mince very finely an onion, one leek and one ounce of lean salt pork.
Place them in a small saucepan with half ounce butter and brown to a good golden colour. Add the potatoes and one bay leaf. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Mix well with the wooden spoon, add one gill hot water. Cover the pan and boil for twenty minutes. Dress on a hot dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A potato braise disguised as a garnish: the whole point is the shape, and the small amount of liquid means it steams rather than boils.
- "Cartridge shape"Trim each potato into short cylinders 1½ inches long, presumably suggesting the profile of a rifle cartridge; the recipe gives no thickness. Uniform size matters more than elegance, since ragged pieces will fall apart before the thick ones are done.
- A gillA quarter pint: 4 fl oz by American measure, 5 fl oz imperial. Either way it is barely enough to generate steam under a lid with three large potatoes, so use a heavy pan with a tight lid and check once or twice that it has not gone dry.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is ½ teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by modern taste for three potatoes; start with half and adjust at the end.
- Salt porkSalt pork varies a good deal in saltiness. Rinse and pat it dry, and hold back some of the ½ teaspoon of salt until you taste at the end.
- "Boil for twenty minutes"With only a gill of water under a lid this behaves more like a covered braise than a boil, whatever the wording. A bare simmer over low heat is safer, as a hard boil risks scorching the onion and pork base before the potatoes are tender.
- The leekSplit it lengthwise and wash thoroughly before mincing; grit trapped in the layers will end up distributed through the whole dish.
- YieldThree large potatoes will serve three or four as a side dish.
The name is military. The Chassepot was the breech-loading rifle adopted by the French army in 1866, and the connection to its cartridge is often said to lie in the shape: a small, rounded cylinder — much as pommes allumettes borrowed the shape of a match. Naming garnishes after the shapes they were cut into was standard practice in the professional French kitchen. The dish itself is a modest étuvée: potatoes stewed in almost no liquid with onion, leek, a bay leaf and a little salt pork, the kind of side that could be turned out in quantity from cheap ingredients while the shaping alone made it look deliberate on the plate.