Prepare mashed potatoes the same as for duchess (No. 2785); make it rather firm with egg-yolks, butter and parmesan; with it fill some large buttered molds lined with puff paste parings (No. 146), rolled out thin; press down well, and smooth the tops. Place on a baking sheet and push in a hot oven; unmold when nicely colored and dress as a garnishing or on a folded napkin.
Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has duchess potato and puff paste trimmings on hand, so the whole recipe is two cross-references and a shaping instruction. Everything hinges on the potato being dry and stiff enough to hold a wall of pastry without weeping into it.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and its potato chapter shows how much labor a nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen was willing to spend on a cheap vegetable — mashed potato piped, molded, croquetted, and here enclosed in pastry trimmings so nothing from the pastry bench went to waste. Pommes duchesse, the egg-enriched purée underpinning all of it, is a French restaurant preparation documented in French kitchens over the course of the nineteenth century, whose name is conventionally read as a courtly flourish rather than a reference to any particular duchess. The neighboring recipe, Timbale à la Parmentier, nods to Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the pharmacist who campaigned to make the potato respectable French food in the late eighteenth century; a century later it was respectable enough to be dressed on a folded napkin at Delmonico's.</p>