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Potatoes, Anna
Peel, wash and drain four good-sized, sound, raw potatoes. Slice them with a Saratoga-chip potato machine. If none is at hand, slice them as fine as possible. Grate two ounces Parmesan or Swiss cheese. Heat one ounce butter in a small frying pan, remove the pan from the fire and cover the bottom with a light layer of potatoes. Mix a teaspoon salt with two saltspoons white pepper, sprinkle a very little over the potatoes, spread a very little of the cheese over the potatoes, and place a few little bits of butter over the cheese. Arrange another layer of potatoes-and so on till all are employed. Cover the pan and place on a moderate fire for five minutes. Turn them over with a cake turner; let them cook again for three minutes and then place in the hot oven for ten minutes. Remove them from the oven. Turn on a hot dish and serve.
A cheese-laced version of pommes Anna, cooked on the stovetop and finished in the oven. Two things decide whether it works: how thin the slices are and how firmly the cake is packed.
- The hinge: slice thin, don't rinse afterCut the potatoes about 1/16 inch on a mandoline. The recipe washes them before slicing, which is right — rinsing the slices themselves strips the surface starch that glues the layers into a single cake.
- Saratoga-chip machineThe 19th-century hand slicer sold for making Saratoga chips. A mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor does the same job; a knife will work but the layers will be less even.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon white pepper against 1 teaspoon salt. That is a lot of salt for four potatoes — season lightly per layer and taste as you build.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 400-450F, though the usage is not consistent. Ten minutes at that heat sets the top; if your potatoes are thicker than 1/16 inch, expect closer to 20-25 minutes before the centre yields to a knife tip.
- Pan and butterUse a heavy skillet with sloping sides, 8 inches for four potatoes, and one that can go into the oven. One ounce of butter for the pan plus dots between layers is on the thin side by modern standards; 3–4 ounces total gives a better crust and a cleaner release.
- Pack each layerPress the potatoes down firmly as you go, overlapping the slices. A loose cake falls apart at the turn.
- The turn"Moderate fire" here is medium heat. Five minutes browns the base; slide the cake onto a plate and invert it back into the pan rather than trying to flip it with a turner, which tends to shear the layers.
- CheeseTwo ounces of Parmesan or Swiss cheese across four potatoes; Gruyere is the usual modern choice for the Swiss. Grate it fine so it melts rather than sitting in pockets that scorch against the pan.
- YieldFour good-sized potatoes make a cake serving four as a side dish. Cut it in wedges at the table.
Pommes Anna belongs to the French Second Empire, and is generally traced to the kitchen of the Café Anglais in Paris under Adolphe Dugléré, with the name said to honour one of the fashionable women who dined there — Anna Deslions is the usual candidate, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The dish was thought grand enough to warrant its own vessel: a lidded copper cocotte à pommes Anna, made so the whole thing could be inverted and browned on both faces. The classic version is potato, butter and salt and nothing else; the cheese here is an addition of the sort that turns up constantly in Anglo-American cookbooks of the early twentieth century, where French dishes were reprinted for readers who wanted a French name on the menu card but a richer plate under it. The reference to a Saratoga-chip machine points to an American domestic kitchen, where such slicers were in use for the potato chip that had become a popular snack.