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Potatoes, Fondantes
Peel and cut into half-inch dice-shaped pieces six sound, medium-sized raw potatoes. Wash well and drain. Cut into small pieces and melt in a small saucepan one ounce salt pork, add one sound, finely hashed onion and two bay leaves, and brown till of a nice golden colour. Then drop in the potatoes, season with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, and pour in sufficient boiling water to cover them up to three-quarters of their height. Cover the pan, let them slowly cook for forty minutes and suppress the bay leaves. Dress on a hot dish, besprinkling with a little chopped parsley, and serve.
A straightforward braised-potato garnish in the French manner, with two pieces of period vocabulary and one timing that needs judgement.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is a half teaspoon. That is assertive but correct for this dish; white pepper is used so no black flecks show against the potato.
- "Suppress the bay leaves"Nineteenth-century cookbook French for remove and discard them. Fish them out near the end of cooking, before dishing up.
- "Dress on a hot dish"Arrange on a warmed serving dish. These potatoes cool fast and turn pasty, so warm the dish properly.
- Salt porkOne ounce of salt pork is about a thick slice from the belly, rinsed if very salty. Unsmoked bacon or pancetta substitutes cleanly; smoked bacon changes the character of the dish considerably.
- The forty minutesHalf-inch dice in shallow water will be tender in 20 to 25 minutes on a low burner. The extra time is what makes them fondantes, the outsides breaking down into the liquid, but check at 20 minutes and judge by the pan rather than the clock. If the water goes before the potatoes are done, add a splash of boiling water, not cold.
- Water level is the hingeCovering the potatoes to three-quarters of their height, not fully, is deliberate. The top layer steams while the bottom braises and the liquid reduces to a glaze. Too much water and you have boiled potatoes in grey broth; keep the lid on and resist stirring, which breaks the dice.
- Potato varietyA waxy or all-purpose potato holds its dice; a floury baking potato will disintegrate over this length of time. Yukon Gold or similar is the safe choice.
- YieldSix medium potatoes serves four to six as a side dish.
Pommes fondantes — melting potatoes — is a classical French garnish built on the idea that a potato braised in a little fat and liquid, rather than boiled in a lot, absorbs the flavour of both and finishes with a soft, almost creamy exterior. The technique belongs to the same family as the more familiar pommes château and pommes cocotte, all of them ways of turning a cheap vegetable into something that could be sent out under a French name. The salt pork, onion and bay here are often described as an aromatic base of a Franco-American kitchen of the period: pork fat did the work that butter or olive oil would do in other traditions, and salt pork is generally said to have been among the forms of pork most households kept. Its appearance in such a book is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks aimed at cooks who wanted the vocabulary and manner of restaurant French cooking scaled to a home range.