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Potato Souffles
Carefully select six medium, flat, oval-shaped, dry, raw potatoes; neatly peel, trim square, then cut into lengthwise slices the thickness of a silver dollar. Plunge them one by one into hot fat, but far from being up to a boiling point, and fry them for four minutes, taking care to turn them with a skimmer meanwhile. Remove with the skimmer, place them in a frying basket and let stand for five minutes. Thoroughly heat the fat, that is, see that it thoroughly boils, then plunge the potatoes in the basket and constantly shake while frying for two minutes. Take up, drain on a cloth, sprinkle a teaspoon salt over them, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is pommes soufflées, the puffed potato that inflates between two fryings. The recipe is technically sound but leaves out the two numbers that decide whether it works: fat temperature and slice thickness.
- The hinge: two fat temperaturesThe recipe fixes neither, but the first bath is usually put at around 275-325F, hot enough to cook the slice through and set a skin but not to colour it. The second must be genuinely fierce, commonly 375-400F, so the moisture trapped under that skin flashes to steam and lifts it. If the first fry is too hot the skin sets too hard to expand; if the second is too cool nothing puffs at all.
- Thickness of a silver dollarA period silver dollar ran about 1/10 of an inch, roughly 2.5 mm. Cut thinner and the slice crisps into a chip; thicker and it will not inflate. A mandoline set to 2-3 mm is far more reliable than a knife, and every slice should be the same.
- Choose the right potato"Dry" here means mature and starchy: russets or another baking potato, stored rather than new. Waxy or freshly dug potatoes hold too much water and simply blister. Do not soak the slices, and dry them thoroughly, since surface water cools the fat and spits.
- Trim squareThe instruction to peel and trim the potato to a squared block before slicing exists so every slice has the same rectangular outline and the same thickness edge to edge. Uneven slices puff unevenly.
- The five-minute restThe rest between fryings lets the slices cool and the interior steam settle, which is part of what makes them lift in the second bath. Do not skip it, and do not stack them; keep them in a single layer.
- FatThe recipe does not name a fat; beef fat or lard would have been usual in this period and tolerates the high second temperature well. Peanut oil or another refined oil with a high smoke point does the same job. Use a deep pan filled no more than halfway.
- Expect lossesEven in professional kitchens a good proportion of slices refuse to puff, and it is normal to sort the flat ones out and serve only the inflated ones.
- ServingSalt only after the second fry, and serve at once on a folded napkin as directed, which absorbs fat and keeps the shells from steaming. They collapse within a few minutes of leaving the fat.
Pommes soufflées belong to the grand French repertoire that American cookbooks reproduced as a mark of seriousness, and this entry sits in The International Cook Book's survey of national kitchens for exactly that reason. The dish is traditionally said to have been discovered by accident in 1837 on the Paris-Saint-Germain railway line, when a cook pulled his potatoes from the fat to wait for a delayed train and found that returning them to hotter fat made them balloon; the story is repeated in almost every French manual and should be treated as legend rather than documented fact. What is certain is that the technique became a test of a fry cook's judgment, since it depends entirely on potato dryness and on reading the fat by eye, in an age before frying thermometers were standard equipment. Escoffier and his contemporaries listed it among the classic potato garnishes for grilled meats, where it survives in a few old-guard dining rooms still.