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Pepper, Salt and Nutmeg (For this dish we require nice)
For this dish we require nice mealy potatoes.
Wash, peel, and boil about two pounds of potatoes, drain off the water and dry them in the oven, then rub them quickly through a wire sieve. While they are warm mix them with the yolks of eggs, butter, and cream, season with pepper, salt and grated nutmeg. When well mixed, lay this on a floured board and divide into twelve pieces of equal size; shape each piece into a square, mark with a knife, put them on a buttered baking-sheet, egg over the surface, bake in a quick oven, dish up, and serve
This is duchesse potato in square form, written for a cook who already knew the proportions. The recipe gives a weight for the potatoes and nothing else, so the enrichment is left to judgement.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the two pounds of potato is specified. Standard duchesse proportions for that weight are 3 to 4 egg yolks, 2 oz butter and 2 to 3 tablespoons cream — enough to enrich and bind without slackening the mixture. Add the cream last and by degrees; a wet paste will not hold a marked edge.
- Mealy potatoes"Mealy" means floury and high-starch: Russet, King Edward, Maris Piper. A waxy salad potato will give a gluey, elastic purée no matter how carefully it is sieved.
- Drying in the ovenThe step is not optional. After draining, return the potatoes to the dry pan or a tray in a low oven for a few minutes until the surface goes chalky and steam stops rising. Residual water is what makes the shapes slump in baking.
- Sieve while hot"Rub them quickly through a wire sieve" means work fast and while they are hot — cooled potato tears rather than passes, and overworking develops the starch. A ricer or food mill does the same job with less effort; a food processor will turn the lot to paste.
- A quick ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 400 to 450F. The pieces are already cooked; the oven is only there to set the egg wash and colour the ridges, which should take only a matter of minutes.
- Egg over the surfaceBrush with beaten whole egg, or a yolk let down with a spoonful of milk. Chilling the shaped squares for 20 minutes before glazing helps them keep their knife-marks.
- YieldTwelve pieces from two pounds of potato — one or two each; shapes of this kind were customarily sent up alongside fish or a roast, though the recipe itself calls it a dish and simply says to dish up and serve.
Sieved potato bound with egg yolk and butter is one of the workhorses of the late nineteenth-century professional kitchen, usually catalogued as pommes duchesse and generally traced to the French repertoire on which British high-class cookery drew heavily. Its virtue was that it could be shaped in advance, held, and finished in minutes to order — piped into borders and rosettes, moulded into pears and croquettes, or, as here, cut into plain marked squares. A purée given body enough to stand up on the plate was a common accompaniment to poached or fried fish, holding its shape beside a sauce in a way that plain mashed potato would not.