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Potatoes for Entrees
Remove all of the inside from half a dozen baked potatoes, work in with it a little butter, salt and breadcrumbs and chopped parsley; beat well with a fork and work in one egg; then boil some oyster-plant until it is tender, pass it through a fine sieve, mix it with a little cream, and season to taste. Half fill some well-buttered eggcups with the potato mixture, put a teaspoonful of the oyster-plant cream over and fill up with more of the potato mixture, after which turn them out, brush them over with egg, dust with breadcrumbs and plunge them into a pan of boiling fat and fry. Take them out, drain and serve while hot with a cream sauce poured around or separately in a sauceboat.
A stuffed potato croquette shaped in eggcups, with a hidden core of salsify cream. The whole thing hinges on the potato mixture being dry and stiff enough to hold the seam closed when it hits the fat.
- Oyster-plant is salsifySold as salsify, and occasionally as scorzonera (its black-skinned relative). Peel it into acidulated water, as the cut flesh browns quickly, and simmer until a knife slides through, roughly 20-30 minutes depending on thickness. The name comes from the faintly oyster-like flavour, not from any shellfish in the dish.
- Bake the potatoes dryUse large russets and bake them at 400F until fully soft, then scoop and mash while hot so the steam escapes. Boiled or waterlogged potato will not hold its shape in the fryer, and no amount of breadcrumb will save it.
- The eggcups are moulds, not cookwareThey are used only to shape and layer the croquette, which is turned out before frying. Butter them heavily and chill the filled cups for 20-30 minutes so they release cleanly and the shapes firm up.
- Keep the salsify cream thickA teaspoonful of loose purée will burst through the seam. Cook the sieved salsify down with the cream until it mounds on a spoon, then cool it before it goes into the middle.
- Frying fat350-375F, deep enough to float the croquettes, and only three or four at a time so the temperature holds. "Boiling fat" in this book means fat at frying heat, not literally boiling. Two to three minutes, until evenly browned, is enough since everything inside is already cooked.
- Double the coatingEgg wash and crumb, then let them rest ten minutes and repeat. One coat over a mould seam splits often; two rarely do.
- The cream sauceA plain bechamel, thinned to pouring consistency and seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg if you like. Bechamel of the period was often built partly on veal or chicken stock rather than milk alone, though the recipe says nothing about how the sauce was made.
- YieldThe recipe specifies half a dozen potatoes but does not say how many eggcups; the flesh of six potatoes will fill considerably more than six eggcup moulds, so expect a dozen or more small croquettes and portion accordingly.
Salsify was a common winter root in nineteenth-century American and European kitchens, valued precisely for the oyster suggestion in its flavour, and it turns up in period cookbooks as mock oyster soup and fried "oyster-plant" cakes as well as in purees like this one. It has largely fallen out of supermarket circulation since, which is why the name confuses modern readers more than the technique does. The recipe is characteristic of grand hotel cookery of the period: a homely ingredient, potato, given a moulded shape, a concealed centre and a sauceboat. Filling eggcups as croquette moulds is a hotel-kitchen economy of the sort that let a brigade turn out identical portions at speed.