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New Potatoes a la France
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 lbs. new potatoes 2 sprigs mint 1 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1 tablespoonful lemon juice Wash and scrape potatoes. With round vegetable cutter scoop out from potatoes a number of little balls like marbles; boil these till tender in water, to which have been added salt and mint. Drain, add Crisco, parsley, and lemon juice. Toss them about gently in pan a few minutes, and serve on hot dish.
A straightforward potato dish whose only real demand is patience with the melon baller. Everything else is timing.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so Crisco appears where an older cookbook would say butter or lard. Three tablespoons of any neutral fat works; butter is an equally good choice here, since the fat is essentially a coating added after draining.
- "New potatoes"Genuinely new potatoes — thin-skinned, freshly lifted, waxy. Small red or white creamers, or fingerlings, hold their shape when balled and boiled. Older starchy baking potatoes crumble at the edges.
- ScrapingNew potato skin rubs off under cold water with a stiff cloth or the back of a knife; no peeler needed. If you are cutting balls out of the interior anyway, skin removal matters less than the recipe implies.
- Yield and wasteTwo pounds of potatoes reduced to marble-sized balls gives perhaps two to three cups, enough for about four small servings. Depending on the size of the potatoes, the trimmings may amount to as much as half the weight or more; keep them for soup or mash rather than discarding them.
- Boiling timeMarble-sized balls cook in 6 to 10 minutes in salted water, not the twenty-odd minutes a whole new potato takes. Test one early; overcooked balls lose their edges the moment you toss them.
- The mintTwo sprigs go into the cooking water and come out with the drained water — this is flavouring, not a garnish. Fish them out before adding the fat.
- Lemon juice lastAdd the lemon juice off the heat with the parsley; held over heat its brightness dulls.
- TossingThe recipe's 'few minutes' is longer than needed if the pan is still over heat; half a minute of gentle rolling in the warm pan is enough to coat them, and less handling means fewer broken edges.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in every corner of the kitchen, and its recipe section is essentially a demonstration catalogue — hence a French-styled vegetable dish where the fat is the point. Potatoes turned or scooped into small even shapes are a long-standing French restaurant practice, sold under names like pommes parisiennes and pommes noisette, and the borrowed elegance of "a la France" was a common way for Anglo-American cookbooks of the period to signal refinement. The mint in the cooking water, by contrast, is a British habit rather than a French one; new potatoes boiled with mint appear throughout nineteenth-century English cookery, and the combination here shows how freely such books mixed traditions under a French title.