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Potatoes Persillade
Boil for thirty minutes in a quart water with a teaspoon salt six small peeled potatoes. Place them in a saucepan with one-half ounce butter. Season with a teaspoon salt and one-quarter teaspoon white pepper. Sprinkle over them one teaspoon finely chopped parsley; squeeze in the juice of half a sound lemon. Toss them gently while warming for five minutes. Place them on a hot dish and serve.
A plain French treatment of boiled potatoes, finished in butter with parsley and lemon. The only real decisions are the size of the potatoes and how much salt you actually want.
- Potato size and boiling timeThirty minutes suits genuinely small whole potatoes of about 2 inches; smaller new potatoes will be done in 15-20. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock, since overcooked potatoes break apart during the tossing stage.
- Salt in two placesA teaspoon in the cooking water plus another teaspoon on six small potatoes is heavy by current taste. Salt the water more generously if you like, then season the finished dish to taste rather than by the spoonful.
- Half an ounce of butterThat is one tablespoon, roughly 15 g. It is a thin coating for six potatoes; two tablespoons gives a glossier finish without turning the dish into a sauce.
- "Sound" lemonPeriod shorthand for a fresh, unblemished fruit. Half a lemon's juice is about 1 tablespoon.
- Toss, do not stirThe recipe's five minutes of gentle warming coats the potatoes in the butter and lemon. Move the pan itself rather than working a spoon through the potatoes, which shears their edges into mash.
- Parsley timingFlat-leaf or curly both work, but add it near the end of the five minutes; held over heat it dulls to olive and loses its point.
- YieldSix small potatoes serve two or three as a side dish. Scale straightforwardly.
Persillade is simply the French for a parsley preparation, most often chopped parsley with garlic, though in this butter-and-lemon form the garlic is absent and the parsley carries the dish alone. Potatoes finished this way belong to the standard repertoire of nineteenth-century French service, in which boiled potatoes were often dressed rather than sent to table plain: they were rolled in butter with parsley, or with cream, or browned in fat, and named accordingly. The assumption behind such a name is that a cook who knew what persillade meant could apply it to fish, veal or new carrots without further instruction.