Parmentier

A bit of history and cooking in this post. One of the French easiest and famous dish is the Hachis Parmentier, made of potatoes and chopped beef. But why is it called like that? Who was Parmentier?

Antoine Parmentier (1737-1813) was a French pharmacologist interested in plant herborization. When the Academy of Besançon implemented a contest asking "what are the vegetables that could be used in case of food shortage and how could they be cooked?", he proposed the potato remembering having eaten it during its captivity (he was a prisoner of the Guerre de Sept ans, that opposed France to the United Kingdom). The funny thing is that he won, even if there was a prohibition to grow potatoes in France, because it was supposed to be a vector of lepra...

After this contest, the members of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris accepted the evidence: the potato was edible!

However, Parmentier, who was working as a pharmacologist in the Invalides Hospital (now known for being the place where Napoleon is burried), was fired because the hospital was run by nuns that didn´t accept that he could grow potatoes in the gardens. Therefore, he decided to promote the potato organizing dinners with famous people, like Lavoisier or Benjamin Franklin.

Louis XVI then offered him some gardens so that he could grow potatoes, and he even gave to the King and the Queen a potato flower bouquet! He really was clever and in order to interest people he employed some armed guards to check his fields during the day. Peole were curious about what was grown under such caution and during the night came to steal the crops!

The King and the Agriculture Society now acknowleged the importance of the potato. And in 1795, after the Revolution that caused a lot of damage in food supplies, potatoes were grown in the Tuileries gardens to face the food shortage.

Known for his promotion of the potato, Parmentier also did a lot of other things! He made compulsory the vaccination against variola, he imagined that sugar could be extracted from beet and not only from sugar cane and worked on food conservation and advised meat cold storage.

He is burried in the Cementery of Père Lachaise, and this is one of my favourite graves. Like an ofrenda, people that come to visit him let some potatoes around...

So, to conclude, here is the recipe of the Hachis Parmentier.

Ingredients:

For the purée: 1kg of potatoes, 20cl of milk, 1 big spoon of fresh cream, 50g of butter, salt, nutmeg, 100g of grated cheese.

For the hachis: 500g ground beef, 1 oinon, garlic, salt and pepper.

Brown the chopped onions and cloves of garlic mixed with a good piece of butter. Add the ground beef, salt and pepper. Put it in a gratin dish.

Prepare the purée (you can cook the potatoes in milk), spread it on top of the meet and add the grated cheese.

Cook it in the oven until the top goes brown.