No. 2781

Potatoes, Cream Of, Baked

Creme de Pommes de Terre au Gratin

Cut up some boiled potatoes the same as for duchess (No. 2785). After they have steamed take from the fire and stir in a piece of butter; work rapidly with a large fork to make a puree, but do not rub it through a sieve; season with salt, nutmeg, a pinch of sugar, and for three or four gills of the puree add four or five raw egg-yolks and a handful of parmesan cheese, diluting very slowly with a gill and a half of rich, raw cream, so as to have the preparation as smooth as for a pudding; when this degree is acquired stir well on the side of the range for two minutes to heat slightly, then remove and incorporate two or three ounces of fresh butter divided in small pats. Pour the preparation at once into a small vegetable dish, lay it on a baking tin and brown the surface lightly in the oven. Eight or ten minutes will be sufficient. Serve in the same dish.

← No. 2780 Potatoes Chopped with Cream, and Baked Potatoes & Sweet Potatoes No. 2782 Potato Croquettes, in Surprise and Maisienne →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A rich potato gratin from Delmonico's kitchen, closer to a savory souffle-pudding than to mashed potatoes. The measurements are in gills and handfuls, and the oven step is a browning, not a bake.

GillsA gill is half a cup. Three or four gills of puree is 1 1/2 to 2 cups; a gill and a half of cream is 3/4 cup.
Dry the potatoes firstThe hinge of the dish. Boiled potatoes are drained and left over low heat to steam off surface water before any butter goes in. Wet potatoes will not absorb the cream and yolks and the gratin will weep.
Fork, not sieveRanhofer is explicit that this puree is not passed through a sieve, though duchesse potatoes are normally sieved or riced. Working with a large fork leaves a slight texture. A food processor is the wrong tool entirely; it turns potato starch to glue.
Raw cream'Rich, raw cream' most likely means fresh, uncooked, unscalded cream; 'raw' is used of the egg yolks in the same sentence. Ordinary heavy cream, unwhipped and cold, does the same work here.
The two minutes on the side of the rangeThe side of a coal range was its cool zone. The aim is to warm the mixture enough to begin thickening the yolks, not to scramble them; over direct heat on a modern burner it will curdle. Use the lowest setting and stir constantly, or set the pan over barely simmering water.
ParmesanA handful of grated parmesan is about 1/2 cup. It should be finely grated so it disperses rather than settling in strings.
The ovenEight to ten minutes to brown the surface implies a hot oven; no temperature is given in the book. A very hot oven, or a broiler with the dish set a few inches below the element, will do. The interior is already warm; this step is color only.
Egg yolksFive yolks in this quantity are barely set by a two-minute warming and a short browning. Anyone cooking for children, the elderly or the immunocompromised should use pasteurized yolks.
YieldProbably about four as a side dish. It is very rich and is unlikely to reheat well; the yolks tighten and the surface goes leathery.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer was chef at Delmonico's in New York across two spells totalling some thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that repertoire, more than a thousand pages of it, numbered and cross-referenced like a catalogue. Au gratin here carries its older French sense of a browned surface rather than the American sense of a cheese-and-cream casserole; the term is usually traced to gratter, to scrape, and to the crust that formed on the sides and top of the dish. The recipe sits in a long sequence of potato preparations that shows how far a nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen would push a cheap vegetable: this one takes boiled potatoes and loads them with five yolks, cream, parmesan and a further two to three ounces of butter beyond what is already in the puree, then serves it in the small dish it browned in. Nutmeg with potato and cream was common seasoning in French cooking of the period.