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Potatoes, Nannette
Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, adding two tablespoons flour; stir well and cook until a nice brown colour, stirring meanwhile. Moisten with a pint of broth. Season with light teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well till it comes to a boil. Drop in twelve new peeled potatoes, add two branches parsley and one bay leaf. Cover pan, set in oven forty-five minutes. Remove, take up parsley and bay leaf, pour potatoes into a deep dish and serve.
A brown-sauce braise for small potatoes, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen. The only real omissions are the oven temperature and the size of the potatoes.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of pepper is about 3/4 teaspoon, and one of nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon — assertive but in keeping with the brown sauce.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A covered braise of this kind will sit happily in a moderate oven, somewhere around 350F; much hotter and the sauce risks reducing too far before the potatoes are through.
- The roux is the hingeCook the butter and flour to a genuine nut-brown before adding liquid. Browned flour thickens noticeably less than pale roux, and two tablespoons to a pint of broth is in any case a light ratio, so expect a sauce that coats rather than one that sets.
- A pint of brothTwo US cups. Use unsalted or low-sodium stock: the recipe's own salt, plus a commercial broth, will overshoot badly once the liquid reduces in the oven.
- New potatoesTwelve small new potatoes, peeled, is roughly 1 1/2 lb — the size of a golf ball or a little larger. If yours are bigger, halve them and start checking at 25 minutes; forty-five minutes suits genuinely small ones.
- Branches of parsleySprigs, stems and all, tied with the bay leaf if you want to fish them out easily. They are aromatics, not a garnish, and go in the bin at the end.
- Doneness and sauceA paring knife should meet no resistance. If the sauce has tightened too far under the lid, loosen it with a splash of hot broth before it goes into the dish.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. It reheats well, though the potatoes soften further.
This is in the manner of Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York and whose The International Cook Book appeared in 1906; it carries the habits of that trade: brief instructions, exact seasoning in saltspoons, and a dish named for someone rather than described. Nineteenth-century hotel and restaurant cookery in the French manner named a great many garnishes and preparations after people, and the names travelled into print cookbooks long after anyone remembered who was meant; who Nannette was, if she was anyone, is not recorded. The technique underneath is plain enough: a brown roux slackened with stock, potatoes dropped in raw so they cook in the sauce and thicken it further with their own starch.