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Soufflé Potatoes
This dish depends for its success a great deal upon the kind of potato used-all potatoes will not soufflé; the best for this purpose are Dutch potatoes; and great care is necessary to have the fat used of the right heat. Peel the potatoes and cut them in slices of equal thickness, about an eighth of an inch each slice. You will require two pans of fat; the first pan must be only moderately hot, and the slices of potato must cook through in this slowly till soft, not crisp; if the potatoes blister or soufflé in the first pan they will not finish properly in the second one. When cooked and soft in the first pan of fat, finish them off in the second one, the fat in which must be very hot indeed, so that the slices puff up at once and colour a golden brown. Serve very hot.
Pommes soufflées are the most temperamental thing in the classical potato repertoire, and this recipe is honest about it. The two points that decide the outcome are the thickness of the slice and the gap between the two fat temperatures.
- The two fat temperaturesThe recipe gives no figures, only "moderately hot" and "very hot indeed." In modern practice the first bath runs at roughly 275-325F: hot enough to cook the slice through, cool enough that it never blisters. The second wants 375-400F, so the moisture trapped under the sealed surface flashes to steam and lifts it. If the slices puff in the first pan, as the text warns, they are spent.
- Slice thicknessAn eighth of an inch is about 3 mm, and every slice must match. Use a mandoline; hand-cut slices vary enough that much of the batch will stay flat.
- "Dutch potatoes"The text does not explain the term, and it may refer to imported stock as much as to a particular type. What the dish needs is a dense, fully mature potato with moderate starch; new potatoes and very floury bakers both tend to fail. No variety succeeds every time, which is why the recipe leads with the warning.
- Dry the slicesPat them thoroughly dry before the first bath. Surface water cools the fat and interferes with the skin that has to form for the slice to inflate.
- Keep them movingSwirl the pan or shake the basket continuously in the first bath so slices do not stick to one another or to the bottom. Lift them out limp and pale, drain, and let them cool for a few minutes before the second bath.
- The fat itselfThe recipe does not say what fat to use; beef dripping or lard would have been the likely choices in a kitchen of this period, and both work well here. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; you need enough depth for the slices to float freely.
- Expect casualtiesEven in a practised kitchen a good proportion of slices refuse to puff. Fry more than you need, pick out the successes, and salt them only after the second frying.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 lb of potatoes serves three or four as a garnish. They collapse as they cool, so they go from fat to plate with nothing in between.
Pommes soufflées belong to the show-off end of nineteenth-century French cooking, and the story attached to them — generally repeated rather than documented — is that they were discovered by accident at the opening of a French railway line in the 1830s, when a delayed train forced a cook to pull half-fried potatoes from the fat and return them to a much hotter pan later. Whatever the truth of that, the double-frying principle behind them is the same one that underlies every good chip: a slow bath to cook the interior, a fierce one to set and colour the outside. What makes the soufflé version different is that the slice is thin enough for the whole interior to turn to steam at once, inflating the sealed skin like a small balloon. In a book of high-class cookery the dish functions as a test of the cook rather than a staple, which is why the recipe spends most of its length on the ways it can go wrong.