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Duchess Potatoes
To two cups hot riced potatoes add two tablespoons butter, one-half teaspoon salt, and yolks of three eggs slightly beaten. Shape, using pastry bag and tube, in form of baskets, pyramids, crowns, leaves, roses, etc. Brush over with beaten egg diluted with one teaspoon water, and brown in a hot oven.
Maître d'Hôtel Potatoes Wash, pare, and shape potatoes in balls, using a French vegetable cutter, or cut potatoes in one-half inch cubes. There should be two cups. Soak fifteen minutes in cold water, and cook in boiling salted water to cover until soft. Drain, and add Maître d'Hôtel Butter.
Cream three tablespoons butter, add one teaspoon lemon juice, one-half teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper, and one-half tablespoon finely chopped parsley.
Two recipes run together here: duchesse potatoes piped and browned, and small potato balls dressed with a compound butter. Both depend on dry, floury potatoes.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures, only the term "hot oven," conventionally taken today as somewhere around 425-450F. Duchesse potatoes want the upper end so the ridges colour before the interior dries out; 10-15 minutes is usually enough.
- Riced, and dryTwo cups of hot riced potato means roughly 1 lb of potatoes before cooking. Use a floury variety such as russet, and return the drained potatoes to the dry pan over low heat for a minute before ricing. Wet purée slumps in the bag and will not hold a piped edge.
- No milk or creamThe recipe calls for none. The egg yolks and butter supply the richness and the yolks set the shape in the oven; added liquid makes the mixture too slack to pipe.
- Work while hotAdd the butter and yolks to potato that is still steaming, and pipe at once. Cooled duchesse mixture stiffens and tears coming through the tube.
- Pastry bag and tubeA large star tube, roughly half an inch across, gives the ridges that catch colour. Pipe onto a lined sheet; the elaborate baskets and crowns of the original are optional and rosettes behave best.
- French vegetable cutterThis is the parisienne scoop, sold now as a melon baller. Half-inch cubes are the stated alternative and cook just as well.
- The fifteen-minute soakSoaking the raw balls or cubes rinses off surface starch so they boil clean and separate rather than clouding the water and sticking together.
- Maitre d'hotel butterIt is creamed, not melted, and added to the hot drained potatoes. Any left over keeps rolled in parchment in the freezer.
- YieldTwo cups of potato gives about four side servings in either treatment.
Pommes duchesse belong to the vocabulary of French professional cookery that American cooking schools absorbed wholesale in the late nineteenth century, and Fannie Farmer's potato chapter reads like a short course in it: duchesse, maitre d'hotel, Lyonnaise, hashed brown in cream. Piping potato through a pastry bag was a hotel and restaurant garnish, a way of turning the cheapest vegetable on the table into architecture around a roast, and it is striking to find it at all in a domestic manual. Maitre d'hotel butter, parsley and lemon creamed into butter, is the plainest of the French compound butters, and the name is current in French cookery well before the era of the Parisian restaurant, where it dressed everything from grilled steak to boiled potatoes.