No. 807

Potatoes, Chiffonnade

Pommes de Terre Chiffonnade

Cut some cold cooked potatoes into three-sixteenth inch slices, also some cooked and pickled beets; take twenty rounds from each of these, using a cutter an inch and a quarter in diameter; dress them in a circle overlapping each other alternating the potatoes and beets and garnish the center with cut up chiccory, or any other cut up salad; seasoned with salt, pepper, fine herbs, oil and vinegar; cover the latter with some thick, ravigote mayonnaise (No. 612), and decorate the top with a few anchovy fillets, tarragon leaves and chopped parsley.

← No. 806 Green or Red Peppers Cold Side Dishes No. 808 Radishes, Black, and Red →

For the Modern Kitchen

A composed cold hors d'oeuvre from Delmonico's kitchen, built entirely from cooked components. The work is in the knife and the arrangement, not the cooking.

The hinge: assemble latePickled beet bleeds into potato within minutes of contact. Cut and hold the two separately, and only overlap them on the platter shortly before it goes to the table.
MeasurementsThree-sixteenths of an inch is a scant 5 mm, thin enough to fan but thick enough to lift with a fork. The cutter is a plain 1 1/4-inch (32 mm) round; twenty discs of each gives a ring of forty.
PotatoesUse a waxy variety boiled in its skin, cooled fully, then peeled and sliced. A floury baking potato crumbles under the cutter and will not hold a clean edge.
ChiccoryIn period American usage this most likely means curly endive or fris tacked; it is not the blue-flowered root chicory sold for coffee, and probably not Belgian endive. Any bitter salad leaf works; shred it fine, which is what chiffonnade means here.
Fine herbsFines herbes is the classic quartet of parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon, chopped fine and used raw. Dried herbs are not a substitute in a dressing this plain.
Ravigote mayonnaiseRanhofer's No. 612 is a ravigote mayonnaise, that is, a mayonnaise worked with green herbs, which both colours and flavours it. Make it thick, since it has to sit on the salad without slumping into the potato ring.
AnchoviesSalt-packed fillets need rinsing and boning; oil-packed can go on as they are. They and the pickled beet carry most of the seasoning, so salt the dressing lightly and taste before adding more.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield; forty discs makes one platter, probably enough for four to six as part of a cold table rather than a main-course salad.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the Cold Side Dishes chapter is essentially the restaurant's hors d'oeuvre repertoire, written for cooks who already knew the technique and needed the arrangement. Chiffonnade comes from the French chiffon, a rag, and describes greens shredded into ribbons; in Ranhofer's usage it appears to name the bed of cut salad at the centre rather than the potatoes themselves. Ravigote, from ravigoter, to revive or perk up, is the standing French name for a sharp green-herb sauce, and appears in both hot and cold forms across nineteenth-century kitchens. The value added lay wholly in the cutter, the overlapping ring and the decoration.