Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Curried Potatoes
Curried Potatoes
Cut into slices a pound or two of cold boiled potatoes, peel and slice a couple of onions, and place the onions in a stewpan with a good-sized lump of fat and fry them until they begin to brown, then place the potatoes in with and dust over with a couple of spoonfuls of curry powder, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper; squeeze in the juice of a lemon, and moisten with a small quantity of clear stock, and toss over the fire for seven or eight minutes; turn the curry onto a hot dish, and serve.
Potatoes, Duchess Select some nice mealy potatoes and beat them to a flour with a fork, not pounding them, but whipping them lightly while they are hot; have ready a couple of eggs well beaten, the whites and yolks separately, the whites being beaten to a stiff froth; beat in the yolks lightly to the mashed potatoes, together with salt and pepper to taste, a tablespoonful of butter and two tablespoonfuls of cream, whip all together until creamy, and then lightly and quickly whip in the frothed whites. Place this mixture in a saucepan over the fire and stir well together until thoroughly hot.
Two recipes have run together in the original typesetting: a quick curry of leftover boiled potatoes, and a Duchesse mixture. Both are straightforward; the curry lives or dies on how the powder is treated.
- Bloom the curry powderDust the powder over the hot onions and fat and let it fry for 30 to 60 seconds before the liquid goes in. Curry powder added to stock without contact with hot fat tastes raw and chalky, and the seven or eight minutes given here is not long enough to fix it.
- "A good-sized lump of fat"Roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons. The recipe does not say which fat; dripping, clarified butter, ghee, butter or a neutral oil all work.
- "A small quantity of clear stock"Start with about 1/3 cup and add more only if the pan goes dry. This is meant to be a moist saute, not a stew — too much liquid and the potato slices collapse.
- Handle the slices onceCold boiled potatoes are fragile. "Toss over the fire" means shaking the pan rather than stirring; a spoon worked through them for eight minutes will produce curried mash.
- LemonA whole lemon over one to two pounds of potatoes is assertive. Add half, taste at the end, and finish with the rest if it needs the lift.
- YieldA pound of potatoes serves three as a side dish, two pounds five or six.
- Duchesse: the potatoes must be dryBake or boil-and-dry them and mash while genuinely hot, working with a fork or ricer. Beating cooked potato hard, or letting it cool, develops a gluey texture that no amount of egg and cream will rescue.
- Duchesse: the saucepan finishAs written the mixture is only heated through in a pan, which gives a light whipped puree. If you want the familiar piped and browned rosettes, use less cream so the mixture holds a shape, pipe it, and brown in a hot oven at 425F for about 10 minutes.
Curried potatoes belong to the long British habit of curry powder as a seasoning for leftovers rather than as the basis of an Indian dish — a use established in London kitchens through the nineteenth century, when commercial blends were sold in tins by grocers and Mrs. Beeton's generation applied them freely to cold meat, rice and vegetables. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms in New York from 1893, and his book is a working compendium of the international hotel repertoire of the period: French classics, English chophouse cooking and Anglo-Indian sides sit side by side. Pommes duchesse, the second recipe here, is the pure French side of that inheritance — egg-enriched mashed potato, generally traced to the professional kitchens of the nineteenth century as a decorative border and garnish. The origin of the name is not documented.