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Potatoes in the Oven
Place in a saucepan some well-washed potatoes, with their skins on, together with enough water to cover them, and boil well; then peel and mash them; spread a layer of the potatoes in a baking-dish, grate some Parmesan cheese over and add a few lumps of butter; use up the remaining quantity of potatoes in the same manner, finish with a layer of the grated Parmesan cheese and butter; brown in the oven, and serve while hot.
Potatoes, Julienne Style Some peeled potatoes of medium-size should be cut into slices crosswise with a fluted vegetable knife, then fried in plenty of smoking hot fat, serving them while hot.
Potatoes, Lulu Chop fine, wash well and wipe on a cloth some raw potatoes, and place them in a saucepan with some butter, season and cook them very slowly while covered, tossing them frequently, and when they become soft, beat them up and dress in layers in a vegetable dish, strewing over them a little grated Parmesan cheese, pour over them some melted butter, and bake for half an hour in a slack oven.
Potatoes, Lyonnese Cut into round slices eight boiled potatoes, and lay them into a fryingpan with an ounce and a half of butter and the round slices of a fried onion, seasoning with a pinch each of salt and pepper. Cook for six minutes, until they become well browned, tossing them all the while, and serve with a small quantity of chopped parsley sprinkled over.
Potatoes Maitre d'Hotel Peel and boil some carefully selected potatoes, taking care not to boil too long; then drain them and let them become cold, after which they are to be cut into rather thick slices. Place in a flat stewpan a good-sized lump of butter and dredge in a half tablespoonful of flour, stir until well dissolved and melted; then mix in gradually a breakfast cupful of broth and stir continually until boiling; then place the potatoes in with a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, with pepper and salt to the taste. Stew them for two or three minutes, move the pan to the edge of the fire and stir in quickly the yolk of an egg previously well beaten with a teaspoonful of cold water and a very small amount of strained lemon juice. When the egg has become thickened turn the potatoes together with their sauce on to a flat dish, and serve.
Five potato garnishes from the Waldorf's vegetable station, printed as a run-on block. Each is short because the kitchen assumed a cook who already knew the drill; the notes below fill in the numbers Oscar left out.
- Oven temperatures"Brown in the oven" for the first dish means hot and fast; call it a hot oven, around 425F, or a few minutes under the broiler, since everything in the dish is already cooked. A "slack oven", as specified for Potatoes Lulu, is usually reckoned at roughly 275-300F, which suits the half hour it is given.
- Boil in the skins, then peelFor the first recipe the skins are left on during boiling, which limits how much water the flesh takes up. Peel while hot with a cloth in hand, and mash without adding liquid, since the butter and Parmesan between the layers are the only moisture the dish gets.
- "Julienne style" is not julienneThe instruction to cut crosswise with a fluted knife produces ridged, crinkle-cut rounds, not matchsticks. "Plenty of smoking hot fat" is around 360-375F; the slices are thin enough to crisp in a minute or two.
- Potatoes Lulu needs dry potatoesRaw chopped potato is washed to remove surface starch, then wiped genuinely dry, or it steams rather than softens in the butter. Keep the pan covered and the heat very low, tossing often, and give it as long as the pieces need before they will crush.
- Lyonnaise timingSix minutes assumes already-boiled potatoes and a pan up to heat. The onion is fried separately beforehand, as directed, and goes into the pan with the potato slices and butter.
- A breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8-10 fl oz; treat it as 1 cup of broth. Half a tablespoon of flour to a "good-sized lump" of butter gives a loose sauce on purpose, since the egg yolk finishes the thickening.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonIn Potatoes Maitre d'Hotel the pan must come off direct heat before the yolk goes in, and the sauce must not return to a boil. Above roughly 180F the yolk curdles and the sauce breaks into grains; the teaspoon of cold water is there to buy a little margin.
- Don't overboil the slicing potatoesBoth the Maitre d'Hotel and Lyonnaise recipes want potatoes that hold a slice, so use a waxy variety and stop cooking while a knife meets slight resistance. Cooling them completely firms them further and is worth the wait.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, catalogues the Waldorf's repertoire in the compressed shorthand of a professional kitchen, and its potato pages read like a station list of classical garnishes under French names. Lyonnaise, from Lyon, in this idiom means "with onions", and Maitre d'Hotel signals butter, parsley and lemon, here extended with an egg-yolk liaison. The fluted cut sold as "Julienne" here shows how loosely such labels travelled between kitchens before Escoffier's Guide Culinaire (1903) fixed much of the vocabulary. Potatoes Lulu appears to be named for a person now unidentifiable, a common fate for hotel garnishes; what it preserves is the technique of cooking raw chopped potato slowly in butter under a lid rather than boiling it first.