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Sweet Potatoes Souffled
Slice some sweet potatoes to quarter-inch widths and fry them slowly in white fat in order that they may cook without coloring or stiffening. Drain them well for ten minutes and then return to the hot fat, when they should puff up considerably.
This is the classic two-bath souffléd potato method applied to sweet potatoes, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen that assumed you already knew it. Everything depends on the temperature gap between the two fryings.
- The hinge: two temperaturesOscar gives none, so supply them. The first bath is slow, about 275-300F, until the slices are limp and cooked through but still pale. The second is hot, 400-425F, and the sudden steam inside the softened slice is what inflates it.
- "White fat"The recipe does not specify which; in this period the term would cover lard or a similar white shortening, chosen because it stays pale at frying heat. A neutral high-smoke-point oil does the same job; butter will not.
- Slice thicknessA quarter inch is thicker than the eighth-inch or so usually specified for pommes soufflees, and Oscar does not explain the choice. Cut on a mandoline so every slice is the same thickness; slices of uneven thickness will not behave alike in the second bath.
- The ten-minute drainThis is a cooling step, not merely draining. The slices must drop well below frying temperature so that the second immersion is a shock. Rushing it gives you limp chips.
- Sweet potatoes are harder than whiteSouffled potatoes work best on dry, starchy tubers. Sweet potatoes carry more sugar and more moisture, so they brown faster in the second bath and some will refuse to puff. Choose firm, dense orange-fleshed roots and pat the slices bone dry; expect a number of failures.
- Sugar and colorBecause of that sugar, watch the hot bath closely — the slices can go from gold to burnt in under a minute. Pull them the moment they inflate and hold their shape.
- Seasoning and servingSalt after the second fry rather than before. Serve immediately; a souffled slice soon collapses. Oscar gives no quantities; treat it as a garnish alongside game, ham or roast poultry.
Souffléd potatoes — pommes soufflées — belong to the repertoire of nineteenth-century French restaurant cooking, and the trick of the double bath is generally traced to an accident in a railway kitchen in France in the 1830s, a story repeated in kitchens for well over a century and documented nowhere reliable. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf, the technique may fairly be read as a mark of a serious brigade: it wastes fat, demands attention, and cannot be prepared in advance, which is arguably why it would have signalled a kitchen with staff to spare. Substituting sweet potatoes has often been seen as a distinctly American turn in that period's hotel cooking, where the native tuber was constantly being pushed into French forms — glazed, puréed, croquetted — and, by this reading, served with the game and Virginia ham that filled the Waldorf's menus.