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Potatoes, Polonaise
Peel and wash six medium, sound raw potatoes; plunge them in a quart of water with a teaspoon salt and boil for forty minutes; drain, arrange on a vegetable dish. Place a half ounce butter in a small frying pan with two tablespoons bread crumbs, toss until a nice brown colour, pour over the potatoes and serve.
A plain boiled potato dressed with browned buttered crumbs — the Polish garnish that gives the dish its name. The only real work is in the pan, and it happens fast.
- Forty minutes is too longWhole peeled medium potatoes are tender in 20-25 minutes at a simmer, tested with a knife tip. Forty minutes of hard boiling leaves them waterlogged and collapsing at the edges.
- Water quantityA quart will not cover six potatoes in most pans. Use enough water to submerge them by an inch and keep the salt at roughly a teaspoon per quart.
- Start cold, simmer gentlyPotatoes put into already boiling water cook unevenly, the outside breaking before the centre softens. Bring them up from cold water and hold at a bare simmer.
- Half an ounce of butterThat is one tablespoon, which is thin for six potatoes and two tablespoons of crumbs. Two tablespoons of butter gives crumbs that brown rather than scorch.
- The crumbsUse dry, fairly fine crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse damp kind. They go from pale to burnt in well under a minute, so keep the pan moving and pull it off the heat while the colour is still lighter than you want.
- Dry the potatoesAfter draining, return them to the hot empty pan for a few seconds to steam off surface water. Crumbs slide off a wet potato.
- YieldSix potatoes serves four as a side dish. Chopped parsley, and sometimes a squeeze of lemon, is often added over the crumbs, though the original omits both.
"Polonaise" in classical French kitchen usage means finished with browned butter and breadcrumbs, very often with chopped hard-boiled egg and parsley added — a treatment most familiar on asparagus and cauliflower, and generally traced to the nineteenth-century French repertoire's habit of naming garnishes after nations and cities. This version strips it to its bones: butter, crumbs, potato. The potato itself had by then been thoroughly at home in Poland for well over a century, which may be the more honest reason for the label.