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Mashed Potatoes (For Roses)
To three cups of hot riced potatoes add three tablespoons butter, one teaspoon salt, the beaten yolks of three eggs and enough hot milk to allow the mixture to pass readily through the pastry-bag with rose tube attached. Shape as roses on a buttered tin sheet, brush over lightly with egg slightly beaten and diluted with one tablespoon milk, and brown delicately in oven.
This is pommes duchesse under another name: stiff egg-enriched mashed potato piped into shapes and browned. The whole recipe turns on getting the consistency right before it ever reaches the pastry bag.
- The hinge: stiffnessAdd the hot milk a tablespoon at a time and stop the moment the mixture will just extrude. Too loose and the roses slump into puddles in the oven; the piped shape should hold its ridges cleanly on the sheet before baking.
- Dry potatoesUse a starchy baking potato, boiled or steamed, drained well, and returned to the dry pan for a minute over low heat to drive off steam before ricing. Waxy potatoes and waterlogged ones both give a slack mixture that no amount of yolk will rescue.
- Rice while hotPotatoes must go through the ricer hot; cooled potato turns gluey when worked. Beat the butter, salt and yolks in quickly and pipe while the mixture is still warm and pliable.
- The rose tubeIn this savoury context a rose tube appears to be a star-type tip producing a rosette rather than a petal tip; pipe a tight spiral from the centre outward and up, the way you would a rosette of buttercream. A narrow opening will clog on stray lumps.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. 'Brown delicately' points to a reasonably hot oven and a short bake, watched closely and stopped as soon as the ridges take colour.
- Buttered tin sheetA rimmed baking sheet, buttered, is right; parchment works better still and makes lifting the finished roses off intact far easier. Leave an inch between them.
- Egg washThe whole-egg-and-milk wash is what gives the glossy tan edges. Brush lightly with a soft brush so the ridges stay sharp rather than being flattened.
- Yield and servingThree cups of riced potato gives roughly 12 to 16 roses, enough for six. They can be piped an hour or two ahead, refrigerated on the sheet, then washed and baked straight from cold with a couple of extra minutes.
Piped potato of this sort is French in origin and usually called pommes duchesse, a garnish rather than a side dish in the classical kitchen: a border run around a platter of meat, or individual shapes set beside a roast to catch the gravy. It appears in American household cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward. The conceit here, potato dressed up as flowers on the Sunday platter, belongs to a moment when a hostess was expected to make the table look composed as well as fed.