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Potatoes, Parisienne
Peel six good-sized potatoes, and with a Parisian potato scoop dig out as many pieces as you possibly can; wash well, drain and place in a sautoire with one and a half tablespoons melted leaf lard. Season with a teaspoon salt and half a light teaspoon white pepper; then set in a brisk oven for thirty minutes, carefully turning over occasionally to let get a nice colour all around. Remove, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward oven-roasted potato that lives or dies on two things: the potato balls being bone dry when they meet the fat, and the oven being genuinely hot. Everything else is knife work.
- The Parisian scoopThis is a melon baller, made in a range of diameters; a larger cutter gives the classic pommes parisienne. Press the cutter in fully and twist a half turn rather than scooping shallowly, or you get domes instead of spheres.
- SautoireA shallow straight-sided sauté pan, and here it needs to be ovenproof — the whole cooking happens in the oven. A heavy metal roasting tin does the same job.
- "Brisk oven"The book gives no number; a brisk oven is usually taken as roughly 400-425F. Much lower and the balls steam in their own moisture and go pale and soft instead of crusting.
- Leaf lardThe soft fat from around the kidneys, prized for its clean flavour and still sold by some butchers. Ordinary rendered lard, duck fat or clarified butter all work; regular butter will scorch at this temperature.
- The fat is scantA tablespoon and a half for six potatoes' worth of balls will leave some dry and stuck. Two to three tablespoons, with the balls turned to coat before they go in, gives even colour without making them greasy.
- Dry them properlyThe instruction to wash and drain matters more than it reads. After washing off surface starch, roll the balls in a towel until no dampness remains; wet potatoes will not brown in thirty minutes.
- TimingThirty minutes suits 25mm balls. Check at twenty — smaller ones will be through sooner, and overcooked they collapse into the pan when turned.
- Yield and the trimmingsSix large potatoes give roughly four servings of balls, with about half the potato or more left as scrap. Save it for mash, soup or a puree.
The name simply marks the shape: à la parisienne in nineteenth-century French kitchen usage generally signalled small, neat, uniform pieces, and the tool that made them took the same name — the Parisian scoop, which English and American cooks came to call a potato scoop and later a melon baller. Its appeal in a professional kitchen was consistency: identical spheres cook at identical rates and plate handsomely. It is also wasteful of potato. White pepper rather than black is presumably to keep dark flecks off the pale gold surface.