No. 3575

Potatoes

Pommes de Terre

Procure lead molds resembling medium-sized potatoes; fill them with chestnut ice cream (No. 3465) and stuff the centers with biscuits soaked in maraschino, also a salpicon of fruits. Freeze for half an hour, then unmold. Roll them in grated sweet chocolate and imitate the eyes by sticking in sticks of almonds; dress on a napkin and serve separately a sauce made of whipped cream and a little maraschino.

← No. 3574 Pears or Apples in Surprise Ices & Ice Creams No. 3576 Ribambelle →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's trompe-l'oeil potato is a period showpiece, but it is built around a vessel no modern kitchen should own or use for food.

The lead moldsLead leaches into food, readily so in the presence of acid, and this dish combines maraschino liqueur and macerated fruit with a lead-walled mold. There is no safe exposure level for dietary lead, and cold slows but does not prevent migration. The instruction is not adaptable: the mold is the recipe's defining piece of equipment, and any modern version needs a current recipe written for food-safe molds.
Why lead at allNineteenth-century professional kitchens valued lead and lead-tin alloys for ice molds because they were soft enough to cast in fine detail, conducted cold quickly, and released a frozen form cleanly. Lead's toxicity was known in general terms by this date but was not treated as a bar to this use; pewter, lead-glazed earthenware and lead foil were all still in ordinary commercial use.
Terms in the textA salpicon here is simply a fine dice of mixed fruit, borrowed from the savoury kitchen where it means diced meat or vegetables bound in sauce. "Biscuits" here most likely means dry sponge fingers of the ladyfinger type, not a soft American biscuit.
MaraschinoThe maraschino Ranhofer meant is the dry, clear Dalmatian cherry-stone liqueur, not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The two are unrelated in flavour despite the shared name.
The cross-referenceNo. 3465 is Ranhofer's chestnut ice cream. The recipe as printed is a shaping and finishing instruction that assumes you have already made that ice, and cannot be executed without it.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a whole genre of frozen deceptions that ran through nineteenth-century grand service: ices dressed as pears, apples, asparagus, hams and, here, dirt-flecked new potatoes complete with almond-splinter eyes. The joke depended on the metal mold, which is why the ice-cream sections of period professional cookbooks read as much like a hardware catalogue as a recipe collection; Ranhofer's own book illustrates dozens of hinged forms. In the recipe the potatoes themselves are dressed on a folded napkin. The vogue for these mimicry ices faded early in the twentieth century.