Home › August › Potatoes À L'Italienne
Potatoes À L'Italienne
To two cups hot riced potatoes, add one tablespoon finely chopped chives, one egg yolk well beaten, whites four eggs beaten until stiff, one-half cup grated cheese. Season with salt, pepper and a few grains cayenne. Pile lightly in a well-greased baking dish and bake from twenty-five to thirty minutes. Turn dish around several times carefully that mixture may puff evenly.
A potato soufflé in all but name, and it behaves like one: the egg whites are the whole structure. Everything else is seasoning.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for a dish of this type; too high and the outside sets before the interior has risen.
- Fold, do not stirThe hinge of the recipe. Mix the yolk, chives and cheese into the warm riced potato first, then fold the stiff whites in in three additions with a spatula. Beating them in collapses the air and you get a dense cake.
- Potato textureRice or press the potatoes while hot and dry — russets or another floury variety. Waxy potatoes turn gluey and will not accept the whites lightly. The original calls for the potato hot; if it is hot enough to set the egg, let it slacken slightly before the yolk goes in.
- Grated cheese"Grated cheese" in an American book of this period could mean either a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan or a dried domestic cheese; a dry aged cheese is the safer choice here, as a moist cheddar will weep fat.
- Turning the dishThe recipe's stated reason is even puffing, and uneven range heat is the likely cause. In a modern oven it is probably unnecessary, and opening the door repeatedly during the rise does more harm than the rotation does good.
- Baking dishUse a straight-sided dish, well greased, large enough to hold the mixture piled up without smoothing the top and with room to rise — a quart and a half is closer to the mark than a quart.
- Doneness and timingTwenty-five to thirty minutes is accurate for a small dish: puffed, browned, and just firm at the centre. Serve at once — like any soufflé it begins to sink within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- YieldTwo cups of potato with four whites gives a side dish for four, or a light supper for two with a salad.
The name is a period convention rather than a claim of Italian origin — "à l'italienne" on American and English menus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could point to cheese, but in classic usage it points to an Italian sauce or to pasta as often as to cheese. What the recipe really represents is the spread of the soufflé method out of professional French kitchens and into ordinary home cookery, where it was applied to whatever was cheap: potato, hominy, cheese alone, leftover fish. 52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of books that organised the year into planned menus for the middle-class household with one servant or none, and a dish like this earned its place by looking impressive on a Sunday table while costing little more than four eggs and a handful of chives from the kitchen garden. The recipe also instructs the cook to turn the dish several times during baking.