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Potatoes, Italienne
Boil six medium, peeled potatoes in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt for thirty minutes. Drain, then cut them into quarter-inch-thick slices. Nicely brown in a frying pan with two tablespoons lard for ten minutes, tossing them once in a while. Place them on a hot dish, crown-like, and keep warm. Place three finely chopped shallots in a saucepan with a teaspoon of butter and brown for three minutes; moisten with a gill of demi-glace, add six finely chopped mushrooms and a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; mix a little and let cook for eight minutes, pour the sauce over the potatoes and serve.
A straightforward garnished potato dish whose success depends almost entirely on how far you take the initial boil. Everything after that is a short pan sauce.
- Do not boil them softThirty minutes may take modern potatoes past the point where they slice cleanly. Boil whole peeled potatoes only until a knife meets slight resistance at the centre, roughly 15-20 minutes for medium waxy potatoes, then cool them a few minutes before slicing so the quarter-inch rounds hold together in the pan.
- Choose a waxy potatoThe recipe assumes a potato that slices cleanly. Yukon Gold, red-skinned or other waxy varieties hold their shape; a russet will crumble when tossed in fat.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fl oz. It is the sauce quantity for the whole dish, so the finished sauce is a spoonful or two per serving, not a pool.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole and brown veal or beef stock reduced together, the standard brown sauce base of the period. Tubs of concentrate sold in supermarkets need diluting to a light, pourable consistency before measuring the half cup, or reduce a cup of good beef stock by half and use that.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard browns potatoes very well and can be used as written. Clarified butter, duck fat or a neutral oil all work; plain butter alone will darken before the potatoes colour.
- Brown the shallots gentlyThree finely chopped shallots in a teaspoon of butter over three minutes means softened and lightly coloured. Push them past that and the whole sauce turns bitter, which no amount of demi-glace will cover.
- Mushrooms and parsleySix mushrooms is about 4 oz of button or cremini. Eight minutes in the sauce drives off their water and concentrates it, so expect the half cup of demi-glace to reduce slightly; add a splash of stock if it goes tight. The parsley here cooks in rather than finishing the dish, so a further pinch at the table is worth adding.
- Serving"Crown-like" suggests the slices overlapped in a ring on a hot platter; the recipe then has the sauce poured over them. Serves four as a side dish, and it will not wait: fried potatoes soften within minutes of the sauce touching them.
"Italienne" in a cookbook of this vintage is a classical French sauce name rather than a claim of Italian origin: sauce italienne is a demi-glace worked with chopped shallots, mushrooms and herbs, essentially the duxelles-and-brown-sauce combination made here, and it is generally traced to the nineteenth-century French repertoire codified by Escoffier and his contemporaries. Any garnish carrying the label meant that duxelles treatment, which is why a plate of fried potatoes could be called Italienne. The dish belongs to the era when hotel and restaurant kitchens built dozens of small variations on a handful of mother sauces.