Home › Potatoes › Potatoes: French
Potatoes: French
1/2 teaspoonful salt, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, Prepare mashed potatoes; put them in a spider in which a tablespoonful butter has been melted, smooth with a palette knife, allow them to cook a few minutes over a moderate fire; when delicately crusted underneath, score in the center, fold omelet fashion, then put on a hot platter. Potatoes a la Hollandaise (French recipe). 1½ cupfuls white stock, 3 cupfuls potato cubes, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, teaspoonful salt, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, 1 tablespoonful shredded parsley.
Pare the potatoes, cut into small cubes, and soak for half an hour in cold water. Cook until almost soft in the white stock, drain, and add the lemon juice, butter, and seasonings.
Two potato dishes run together: a folded cake of mashed potato browned in a pan, and a cubed potato dish finished with butter and lemon. Both are straightforward once the old vessel names are decoded.
- A spider is a frying panOriginally a cast-iron skillet on three legs meant to stand over coals; by the time this book was printed the word simply meant a heavy frying pan. A 9- or 10-inch cast-iron skillet is the right vessel, and it matters here — the whole point is an even brown crust on the underside.
- Palette knifeAn offset or straight metal spatula. It is used to press and smooth the mash into an even layer so the crust forms uniformly rather than in patches.
- The crust is the hingeModerate heat, medium on a modern burner, and no stirring. The recipe asks only for 'a few minutes', so watch for the crust rather than the clock. Poking at it breaks the crust and the cake will not fold cleanly; 'score in the center' most likely means cutting a shallow line so the fold does not crack.
- Dry mash folds, wet mash does notMash made with a good deal of milk or cream will slump in the pan. Leftover mashed potato, cold and stiff from the refrigerator, works better than a fresh soft batch.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock, veal or chicken, with no browned bones and no tomato. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; period white stock was often made unsalted, so the recipe's teaspoonful of salt may be carrying the whole seasoning.
- Soaking the cubesThe half hour in cold water pulls out surface starch so the cubes stay separate rather than clouding the stock and breaking down. Drain and pat them before they go into the pot.
- Cook until almost softSmall cubes in simmering stock need roughly 8 to 12 minutes. They finish cooking in their own heat after draining, so pulling them a shade early is correct — the recipe means it.
- The TabascoNamed brands do appear in cookbooks of this period, sometimes through arrangements with manufacturers, though nothing here shows that. A dash is a few drops; the dish is meant to be lemony and buttery, not hot.
- YieldThree cupfuls of potato cubes serves about four as a side. The recipe gives no quantity for the mashed potato; enough to fill the pan in an even layer is the only guide.
Both dishes belong to the wave of French-inflected cookery that American household manuals absorbed around 1900, when a recipe gained authority simply by being labelled "French" or "à la Hollandaise" — the latter name here signifying only butter and lemon, not the emulsified sauce. The folded potato cake is a domestic cousin of the pomme galette and the potato omelette, a way of turning yesterday's mash into something presentable at a period when the household economy of leftovers was taken seriously in print. The appearance of McIlhenny's Tabasco by brand name is telling: the sauce had been in commercial production in Louisiana since the 1860s, and by the turn of the century it was common enough in northern kitchens that a compiler could specify it rather than "a dash of cayenne." The habit of naming brands in recipe text, sometimes at the manufacturer's encouragement, was widespread in compilations of this kind.