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Potatoes, Macaire
Finely mince a medium, sound, white onion; place in a saucepan with a tablespoon butter and gently brown for five minutes; then add four cold, boiled potatoes cut into thick slices. Season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; toss them a little, and let cook for fifteen minutes; lightly toss once in a while. Transfer into a vegetable dish and serve.
A four-line sauté that depends entirely on having the right potatoes and enough patience to leave them alone. Two measurements need translating before you start.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of white pepper for four potatoes. That is assertive by current taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks want, and the full teaspoon of salt is also on the generous side if the potatoes were boiled in salted water.
- The hinge: leave them stillFifteen minutes in butter is what builds the crust, and "lightly toss once in a while" points to occasional turning rather than constant stirring. Each disturbance breaks the browned face before it sets and you end up with hash rather than distinct slices.
- Which potatoesUse waxy or all-purpose potatoes boiled the day before and thoroughly chilled. Freshly boiled floury potatoes shed their edges the moment they meet the pan, and warm potatoes steam instead of browning.
- Pan and heatA wide, heavy skillet over medium heat, not a deep saucepan; the slices need to sit in one layer with contact on the bottom. If they are crowded two deep, brown them in two batches.
- Watch the onionFive minutes of "gently brown" is a light gold, not a deep caramel. The onion has another fifteen minutes to go with the potatoes and will scorch and turn bitter if it is already dark when they go in.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon for four potatoes is thin by modern habit. Two to three tablespoons browns more reliably without making the dish greasy, though the original calls for only one.
- YieldFour potatoes serve three to four as a side dish. The cold boiled potatoes may well be leftovers from a previous meal, which would explain the casual quantities.
The name in classic French cookery belongs to a different preparation: pommes Macaire proper is baked potato scooped from the skin, mashed with butter and seasoning, then pressed into a flat cake and browned in clarified butter, a version found in the Escoffier-era repertoire. The name is traditionally linked to Robert Macaire, the vagabond villain of the French stage, a character introduced in L'Auberge des Adrets (1823) and given his own melodrama in 1834; the connection to the dish is tradition rather than documented fact. What appears here is a looser, more domestic reading of the idea, closer to a plain onion sauté of cold boiled potatoes, the sort of drift common in period household cookbooks, where French names carried prestige and were attached to simplified versions.