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Duchess Potatoes
Mix two tablespoons of butter, the yolks of two eggs and a little salt and pepper with two cups of riced potato. Shape by means of pastry bag and tube, in pyramids, leaves, crowns, etc. Brush over with egg glaze, composed of beaten egg mixed with one teaspoon of water. Brown in hot oven.
A short, workable formula that assumes you already have hot boiled potatoes and a ricer. The proportions are sound; the omissions are the oven temperature, the yield and the fact that the mixture must be piped while hot.
- Pipe while hotThe hinge of the dish. Riced potato stiffens as it cools, and cold mixture will not pass cleanly through a star tube. Rice the potatoes straight from the pot, beat in the butter and yolks at once, and pipe immediately.
- "Hot oven"In this period that means roughly 425-450F. The shapes are already cooked through; the oven is only setting the surface and colouring the glaze, which takes about 10-15 minutes. A broiler works too, watched closely.
- Riced potatoTwo cups is about 1 lb of potatoes before cooking. Use a floury variety such as russet, and let the drained potatoes steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before ricing. Wet potato slumps in the oven. A food processor is the one tool to avoid here, as it turns potato to paste.
- Two tablespoons of butterAn ounce for a pound of potato is restrained by modern standards, and deliberately so: this is a garnish meant to hold its shape, not a bowl of mash. Adding more butter or any milk will make the piped forms sag.
- Egg glazeOne whole beaten egg with a teaspoon of water is far more than these quantities need. Beat one egg, use a spoonful, and keep the rest for something else. Brush lightly; a puddle of glaze in the crevices browns unevenly.
- Pastry bag and tubeA large open star tube, half an inch or more across, is what the shapes require. Pipe directly onto a buttered or parchment-lined sheet. Rosettes and small crowns are the practical shapes; the "leaves" of the original need a flat leaf tube and a steady hand.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 piped rosettes, enough to garnish a platter for six, or to serve four as a side dish.
- Making aheadThe piped shapes can be chilled on the sheet for several hours and glazed just before baking. Add a few minutes in the oven if they go in cold.
Pommes duchesse belong to the vocabulary of nineteenth-century French professional cooking, where a piped potato border was one common way to dress a platter of meat or fish, and the codified repertoire that Escoffier set down carries the same basic formula: dry riced potato, butter, egg yolk, seasoning, no liquid. The name is one of a long series of decorative kitchen titles -- duchesse, marquise, dauphine -- that appear to attach a courtly word to a technique rather than to any particular duchess, though this is inference rather than documented fact. Its appearance in the Butterick book, a volume aimed at American households rather than hotel kitchens, suggests that something of restaurant garnishing had found its way into middle-class home entertaining by the early 1900s; the pastry bag, once a confectioner's tool, is here assumed to be sitting in the reader's drawer.