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Potatoes, Villageois
Peel, wash and cut in quarter-inch squares four good-sized potatoes; place in a small saucepan with a pint white broth, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; tie in a bunch two branches parsley and a clove garlic and add to the potatoes; cover the pan, boil for five minutes, then place in the oven for twenty minutes more. Remove, take up the bouquet, add a half tablespoon good butter and three tablespoons cream, gently mix for a minute, pour into a vegetable dish and serve.
A simple braised potato dish that lives or dies on the dice: quarter-inch cubes cook through in the stated time and hold their shape, while larger pieces will still be raw at the twenty-minute mark. Everything else is seasoning and finishing.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So two saltspoons pepper is half a teaspoon, and a saltspoon of nutmeg is a quarter teaspoon — assertive but in keeping with the period's fondness for nutmeg in cream sauces.
- White brothA light unbrowned stock, traditionally veal or chicken, unsalted or barely salted. Use a low-sodium chicken stock and taste before adding the full half teaspoon of salt; modern commercial stock is much saltier than the kitchen-made version assumed here.
- Oven heatThe original gives no temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, is right for this: the pan stays covered and the point is a steady simmer, not browning.
- The panIt must be ovenproof and lidded, since the dish starts on the stove and finishes in the oven; use a small Dutch oven or a stainless saute pan with a tight lid.
- The bouquetTwo sprigs of parsley and a whole garlic clove tied with kitchen string, so the whole thing lifts out clean. Do not chop the garlic — the dish wants perfume, not garlic flavour in the foreground.
- Liquid at the endA pint of broth to four potatoes leaves the cubes swimming rather than glazed. Check at twenty minutes; if there is more than a few spoonfuls of liquid left, reduce it briefly on the stovetop before the butter and cream go in.
- FinishingAdd the butter and cream off strong heat and fold gently for a minute. Vigorous stirring at this stage breaks the softened cubes down into something closer to a mash.
- YieldFour good-sized potatoes, roughly two pounds, serves four as a side.
Villageois is simply French for "of the village" or "rustic," one of a large family of nineteenth-century garnish and preparation names — bonne femme, paysanne, fermiere — that signalled plain country cooking to diners eating in restaurants and hotels that were anything but. The convention was well established by the time this book was compiled: a professional kitchen could put a dish of diced potatoes stewed in broth on the menu and, by attaching a rustic label, present modesty as a style. The method itself is standard braising practice of the period, with the bouquet garni lifted out before service and the enrichment of butter and cream added at the last moment so it neither splits nor cooks away. The heavy hand with nutmeg is characteristic of turn-of-the-century French-influenced American cookery, where it appeared in creamed vegetables, white sauces and forcemeats as a matter of course.