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Potatoes, Normande
Peel, wash and drain twelve very small round potatoes. Heat in a saucepan one and one-half tablespoons butter, add the potatoes and let briskly brown for ten minutes, turning over once in a while; sprinkle over a teaspoon salt. Cover the pan, set in the oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, lift up with a skimmer, dress on a deep dish and serve.
A plain French sauté of whole small potatoes, browned on the stovetop and finished covered in the oven. Almost everything depends on the potatoes being genuinely small and closely matched in size.
- Potato size and type"Very small round potatoes" means new potatoes or small waxy varieties, perhaps 1 to 1.5 inches across; depending on where in that range they fall, twelve could weigh anywhere from about half a pound to a pound and a half. Uniform size matters more than variety, since one large potato in the pan will still be raw when the rest are done.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350–375F, will finish them in the stated twenty-five minutes; test with a skewer, which should meet no resistance at the center.
- Dry them properlyAfter washing and draining, blot the potatoes dry before they go into the butter. Surface water will steam rather than brown and you lose the crust the ten-minute sauté is meant to build.
- Butter quantityOne and a half tablespoons is thin for a dozen potatoes in a modern wide pan. Use a heavy pan just large enough to hold them in a single layer, or increase to 2–3 tablespoons; clarified butter or butter with a little oil resists scorching over the browning stage.
- SaltA full teaspoon is generous by current taste for this quantity. Half a teaspoon at the browning stage, adjusted at the table, suits most palates.
- Covered pan in the ovenThe lid traps steam so the interiors cook through without the outsides burning. If your pan has no ovenproof lid, foil crimped tightly over the top does the same work.
- Skimmer and servingA "skimmer" is a perforated or slotted lifting implement; a slotted spoon does the job, and lifting the potatoes out this way leaves the butter in the pan. Twelve small potatoes serve three to four as a side dish.
Dishes labeled normande in French cookery usually point to Normandy and its dairy and orchard produce — cream, butter, apples, cider — and here the marker is simply butter, used generously and as the only fat and seasoning. Cooking small whole potatoes this way, browned in a pan and then finished under a lid, is close to the pommes de terre rissolées method found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French kitchen manuals; the potatoes emerge glazed and crusted rather than crisp all over, as roasting would leave them.