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To Shape Roses
Fill pastry bag with potato mixture. Hold the bag upright with tube pointing downward. Guide tube with left hand and press out potato with the right, making a circular motion. When roses are the desired size press the tube gently into mixture and withdraw it quickly to stop the flow and give the pyramid a pointed finish. Sweet potatoes may be prepared in the same manner.
This is the finishing step for duchesse potatoes, and the book assumes you already have the seasoned, egg-enriched purée standing by. Everything depends on the mixture, not the hand motion.
- The mixture is the hingePiped potato holds its shape only if the purée is stiff and dry — baked or steamed potatoes rather than boiled, riced while hot, and bound with egg yolk and a little butter. A wet mash will slump into a puddle the moment it leaves the tube, no matter how neatly it was piped.
- Rice it, do not mash itAny lump or fibre will jam the tube mid-rose. Push the cooked potato through a ricer or fine sieve, and never use a food processor, which turns starch gluey.
- Tube sizeThe book says only "tube." A large open star, roughly 1/2 inch across, is what gives the ridged rose shape; a plain round tube gives a smooth cone. Fit the bag with a coupler if you want to switch.
- Work warmWarm purée pipes; cold purée fights the bag and splits at the ridges. Fill the bag with the mixture still hot enough to handle comfortably and pipe straight away.
- Pipe onto the right surfaceParchment-lined sheets, or directly onto a buttered platter that can go into the oven. A brief chill before baking may help the piped roses hold their edges, though the book gives no such direction.
- Yield and useThe book gives no quantities here; piped roses of this kind serve as a garnish border for a roast or a fish platter, one or two per person, rather than a side dish in its own right.
- Sweet potatoesThey run wetter and sweeter than white potatoes. Bake rather than boil them, and expect to add a little more egg yolk to get a mixture that will stand.
Piped potato of this kind is generally traced to French pommes duchesse, a nineteenth-century restaurant garnish, and such decorative work spread in American home cooking alongside the cookery-school teaching of the later nineteenth century. By this period the pastry bag was moving out of the confectioner's shop and into the domestic kitchen, and household manuals of the type do show potato roses, borders and baskets among the ways of dressing a roast. That an instruction is given over entirely to shaping suggests something about the period's priorities: the flavour was assumed, the presentation had to be taught.