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Potatoes, Mattre D'Hotel
Cut four fairly good-sized, peeled, cold boiled potatoes into medium-sized slices. Have in a saucepan one tablespoon melted butter and one tablespoon flour; stir well with a wooden spoon till well heated, then add one gill hot milk and one and a half gills cream. Season with half a teaspoon salt, one saltspoon white pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, then add the potatoes, a light teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and the juice of half a sound lemon. Toss them well in the pan while slowly cooking for ten minutes. Turn on a hot, deep dish and serve very hot.
A creamed potato dish built on a small white roux, finished with parsley and lemon. Everything hinges on how the acid meets the cream.
- Add the lemon last, off the heatLemon juice stirred into a hot cream sauce can curdle it, and the original has you cook a further ten minutes after adding it. Take the pan off the burner, add the juice, and swirl it in just before serving; the flour in the roux gives some protection but not much.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/2 cup hot milk and 3/4 cup cream. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making the pepper 1/4 teaspoon and the nutmeg roughly 1/8.
- Butter and flour by weightOne tablespoon each gives a loose sauce for 1 1/4 cups of liquid, which is what is wanted here — it should coat the slices, not set around them. Cook the roux a minute or two without letting it color.
- Which potatoesUse waxy or all-purpose potatoes boiled the day before and thoroughly chilled; slices from a floury baking potato collapse the moment you toss them. Cut them about 1/4 inch thick.
- "Toss them well"This means lifting the pan and shaking, not stirring with a spoon, which is how the slices survive intact. Ten minutes over low heat is to warm the potatoes and let the sauce thicken slightly, not to cook them further.
- YieldFour medium potatoes serve three to four as a side dish. It does not reheat well — the sauce breaks and the slices go mealy.
The name points to a standard French preparation: beurre maître d'hôtel is butter worked with chopped parsley, salt, pepper and lemon juice, the plainest of the compound butters and a usual finish for grilled meat and boiled vegetables. Dishes labeled maître d'hôtel in period cookbooks generally carry that combination of parsley, lemon and butter, here extended into a cream sauce.