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Duchesse Potatoes
Wash, peel and boil two pounds potatoes, drain off water and dry in oven, then rub through sieve, add 3 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon cream, seasoning salt, pepper and grated nutmeg. When well mixed lay on floured board and divide into 12 pieces, shape each piece into a square, put them on a buttered tin, brush over with beaten egg and bake in hot oven till well browned.
A standard duchesse mixture, written for a piping-free kitchen: the potato is shaped by hand rather than forced through a star tube. The whole thing turns on how dry the potato is before the enrichment goes in.
- Dry the potato properlyDraining and then drying the boiled potatoes in the oven for a few minutes is the hinge of the recipe. Wet potato will slump in the oven and refuse to brown; the surface should look chalky before you sieve it.
- Choose a floury potatoRussets or a similar high-starch baking potato give the texture this needs. Waxy new potatoes turn gluey when sieved and worked.
- Sieve, do not mashA drum sieve or a ricer keeps the starch cells intact. A food processor will produce wallpaper paste in seconds.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period that generally means somewhere around 400-450F. The pieces are already cooked through, so the heat is only there to set and colour the surface.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote the shortening, and it is still sold, but 2 tablespoons of butter gives better flavour here and behaves the same way in the mixture.
- Buttered tinA rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment is easier, though the buttered surface does help the bases brown.
- Egg wash and shapingWork with cool mashed potato and floured hands; warm mixture sticks. Brush the egg on lightly, as a heavy coat pools and scorches before the potato colours.
- Yield and timingTwelve pieces, so four to six as a side dish. Expect roughly 15-20 minutes at that heat, going by colour rather than the clock.
Pommes duchesse belong to the repertoire of nineteenth-century French professional cooking, where enriched sieved potato was piped into rosettes and borders to frame a roast or a fish on the platter. Its appearance here is a sign of how thoroughly restaurant garnishes had filtered into American middle-class cooking by the 1910s, and the recipe's shortening is the tell for this particular book: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to demonstrate Crisco, launched in 1911, in every dish it could plausibly enter. Squares shaped by hand rather than rosettes piped through a bag suggest the audience was a home cook without a pastry tube. Salt, pepper and nutmeg are the classical seasoning for the dish.