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Chantilly Potatoes
Prepare nicely seasoned, lightly mashed potatoes and mound on a hot platter. Beat 1/2 cup cream until stiff, add 1 teaspoon melted Crisco, 1/2 cup grated cheese, season to taste with salt, pepper and red pepper. Pile lightly on to the potato and put in oven to brown. Be sure that the oven is very hot.
A gratin-style potato dish in which the browning topping is sweetened-free whipped cream rather than a sauce. Most of the success rides on the oven being hot enough to set and colour the cream before it slumps.
- "Very hot" ovenThe book gives no temperature, only the instruction to be sure the oven is very hot. Take it as the top of your oven's range, or brown under the broiler, watching it closely; a moderate oven will simply melt the topping into the potato.
- The whipped cream is the hingeWhip the half cup of heavy cream to stiff peaks, then fold the cheese in with a light hand. Overworking it, or folding while the melted shortening is still hot, deflates the foam and you lose the puffed, browned crust that gives the dish its name.
- CriscoThe teaspoon of melted shortening is here because this book was written to sell it. Melted butter does the same job and tastes better; the quantity is small enough that omitting it entirely changes little.
- Red pepperIn American cookbooks of this period "red pepper" means cayenne, not paprika or crushed chilli flakes. A pinch is enough against half a cup of cream.
- The cheeseUnspecified in the recipe. Grate it fine so it melts before the cream browns; a hard aged cheese or Parmesan works well and browns faster.
- Keep the potatoes dry"Lightly mashed" means not whipped to a paste. Mash them fairly dry and stiff so the mound holds its shape and does not weep liquid under the topping.
- Hot platterAssemble on the metal or ovenproof dish you intend to serve from, and warm it first. A cold platter chills the potato and the whole thing takes longer to brown.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity for the potatoes and states no yield; the topping is half a cup of cream with half a cup of cheese, so scale the mound to suit.
"Chantilly" in French kitchen usage means whipped cream, sweetened or not, and the name is traditionally traced to the Chateau de Chantilly and to Vatel, its celebrated seventeenth-century maitre d'hotel, though the attribution is legend rather than record. By the late nineteenth century the term had settled into English-language cookbooks as a general marker for anything finished with whipped cream, savoury as well as sweet, and potatoes Chantilly appear in professional and domestic manuals alike as a way of dressing up plain mashed potato for company. Its appearance here, in a book whose recipes routinely call for a teaspoon or two of Crisco, reflects the era when Procter & Gamble commissioned cookery writers to demonstrate that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the menu, right down to a single teaspoon folded into cream.