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Potatoes, Lisbonne
Peel and wash twelve even-sized, new, sound potatoes and keep in cold water until required. Finely slice one medium, white onion, place in a saucepan with tablespoon melted butter and fry ten minutes, stirring once in a while; add one teaspoon flour, stir well, add three crushed fresh red tomatoes, a sprig thyme, one clove, one bay leaf, one gill broth, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Mix well and let boil twenty minutes. Strain sauce into another saucepan, drain and add potatoes, cover pan and set in oven forty minutes. Remove, pour into a dish and serve.
A simple braise of whole new potatoes in a strained tomato-onion sauce. The original assumes small potatoes and a stove-top-to-oven pan, and it never names a temperature.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. That is not much liquid for twelve potatoes, so use a pan just wide enough to hold them in a single layer and keep it tightly covered.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is usually reckoned a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by modern taste; start with half and adjust at the end.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, somewhere around 350-375F, suits a covered braise of this kind; the potatoes are done when a knife slides in with no resistance. Forty minutes suits small new potatoes; larger ones will need longer.
- New potatoesThe recipe depends on waxy new potatoes that hold their shape. Floury baking potatoes will collapse into the sauce. Keeping the peeled potatoes in cold water, as directed, stops them browning.
- Straining the sauceThe whole point of the strain is to remove the tomato skins, seeds, clove, bay and thyme so the potatoes sit in a smooth, glossy liquid rather than a chunky stew. Press the solids firmly against the sieve to get the body out of them.
- Fresh red tomatoesThree crushed fresh tomatoes in season, peeled or not since the sauce is strained. Out of season, about a cup of good tinned tomatoes gives a closer result than pale winter fruit.
- Frying the onionTen minutes in butter over gentle heat should soften the onion; the sauce reads as a red one rather than a browned one. Stir the flour in briefly before the tomatoes go in.
- YieldTwelve potatoes will serve four to six as a side dish.
The name points to Lisbon, and the dish belongs to a family of southern European potato braises in which tomato, onion, bay and thyme do the work that cream and butter do further north. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, chef and manager at Delmonico's in New York, whose habit was to gather dishes under place names and national headings for an American readership curious about foreign tables. How closely such a dish tracked anything actually cooked in Portugal is another matter. What is genuinely Portuguese in spirit is the restraint, a single clove and one bay leaf, and the insistence on straining so that the potato, not the sauce, is the thing tasted.