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Anna Potatoes
Wash and pare medium-sized potatoes. Cut lengthwise in one-fourth inch slices, and fasten in fan shapes, with small wooden skewers, allowing five slices of potato to each skewer. Parboil ten minutes, drain, then place in a drippingpan, and bake in a hot oven until soft, basting every three minutes with butter or some other fat.
An unusual take on pommes Anna: instead of a buttered cake of overlapping slices, the potato is reassembled as a skewered fan and roasted. The result depends almost entirely on relentless basting.
- "Hot oven"Probably somewhere around 400-450F. Much cooler and the fans risk drying out before the edges take colour.
- The hinge is the bastingEvery three minutes is not rhetorical. The slices are separated by air rather than packed in fat, so any surface left unbuttered will curl and leather over. Keep a small pan of melted butter and a brush at the oven door, or the dish fails.
- SkewersSmall wooden skewers means what we would call cocktail picks or short bamboo skewers, soaked first so they do not scorch. Five quarter-inch slices per skewer, threaded near one edge so they splay open.
- Potato choiceA firm, waxy or all-purpose potato holds the slices intact on the skewer. Very starchy baking potatoes tend to break at the pierce point after parboiling.
- ParboilingTen minutes for quarter-inch slices is generous; check at six or seven. They should bend without snapping, no more. Drain thoroughly and let the surface steam dry before they go near butter, or the fat will not adhere.
- "Dripping-pan"A shallow roasting pan. Use one wide enough that the fans sit apart; crowded, they steam instead of browning.
- "Some other fat"In this period that would likely have covered beef drippings, chicken fat or clarified pork fat, all of which brown well at this heat. Clarified butter or ghee is the closest modern equivalent if you want butter flavour without the milk solids burning.
- YieldFigure one medium potato per person, which gives roughly two fans each. The recipe gives no time, only "until soft"; expect something in the region of half an hour after parboiling. Serve straight from the oven, as the fans go limp on standing.
Pommes Anna is generally traced to Second Empire Paris and is usually credited, on traditional rather than documented grounds, to a chef of the 1860s naming the dish for one of the demimondaines of the period. The classic form is a dense buttered cake of overlapping potato rounds cooked in a covered copper pan made expressly for it. What Fannie Farmer prints here is something else entirely, keeping the name and the butter but discarding the mould, and that substitution is characteristic of the Boston Cooking-School book: French dishes arrive in the American kitchen stripped of the specialised equipment that defined them, rebuilt from a dripping-pan and a handful of skewers.