Imitate small eggs with potato croquette preparation (No. 2782); leave them till quite cold on ice, then cut each one lengthwise in two, thus obtaining two halves for every egg, then cut these again in two on their length; dip these separate quarters in a light frying batter (No. 137), then in hot frying fat and fry to a fine golden color. Dress on a folded napkin.
Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so this reads as a fragment: the whole dish rests on two other numbers in The Epicurean, a potato croquette mixture and a light frying batter. What follows fills in what a modern cook needs to work from it alone.
Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full record of a grand restaurant's repertoire, which is why entries like this one are terse and numbered rather than explained: the reader was expected to be a professional who could follow a cross-reference to the croquette paste and the batter. Potato preparations occupy dozens of consecutive numbers in the book, an inventory of shapes and finishes for what was, by then, the standard garnish of French service, and the practice of building a dish out of a chilled duchesse paste is generally traced to the same nineteenth-century French kitchens that gave us pommes duchesse and croquettes proper. The instruction to imitate small eggs, then quarter them, is characteristic of the period's appetite for garnishes that announce themselves as constructed, and the folded napkin on the platter marks the dish as belonging to the dining room rather than the family table.