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Potatoes, Bateau
Roll out very thin on a lightly floured table a quarter pound feuilletage. Cut it into six oval parts, then line six small boatshaped tartlet moulds; trim well around the edges.
Prepare a potato preparation and with it evenly fill up the six moulds; neatly smooth the surface with the blade of a knife; lightly egg the surface of each, arrange on a tin, set in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish and serve.
A barquette of puff pastry filled with a piped-potato mixture, meant as a garnish or a small savoury course. The recipe assumes you have both the pastry and the potato filling already made, as any professional kitchen of the period would.
- FeuilletageThis is classic puff pastry; a quarter pound is 4 oz, and all-butter frozen puff rolled thin will do the same work. Roll to about 1/8 inch so the shells rise but stay crisp against the wet filling.
- Boat-shaped mouldsThese are barquette tins, still sold under that name, roughly 3 inches long. Six is a small batch — expect to be serving them as an accompaniment rather than a dish on their own.
- "A potato preparation"The phrase points to a separate preparation elsewhere in the book, most likely a stiff duchesse-type mixture: dry riced potato bound with egg yolk and butter, seasoned. No quantity is given here, so work by eye and make it firm enough to hold a smoothed surface without slumping.
- Dry the potatoThis is the hinge. A wet mash will steam the pastry from above and leave the base raw and grey. Rice the potatoes and return them to the dry pan over low heat until they stop giving off steam before adding butter and yolk.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Puff pastry with a filling already cooked wants a hot oven, 425F, for the fifteen minutes stated — enough to set the layers and colour the egg wash.
- Egg wash"Lightly egg" means a thin brush of beaten whole egg or yolk on the potato surface only, to glaze it. Keep it off the cut pastry edges, where it glues the layers and stops the rise.
- UnmouldingLet the tins sit a minute out of the oven before turning them out; the pastry firms as it cools slightly and is much less likely to tear at the point of the boat.
Barquettes — from the French for "little boat" — belong to the garnish vocabulary of late nineteenth-century restaurant cooking, where small pastry cases were filled with a purée, a salpicon or a forcemeat and set around a roast or served as a hot hors d'oeuvre. The potato version depends on pommes duchesse, the stiff egg-enriched mash that is firm enough to be piped into borders, nests and cases; it holds its shape under heat in a way plain mashed potato does not. That this recipe simply says "prepare a potato preparation" and "a quarter pound feuilletage" tells you who the book was written for: cooks who had those components standing by, and who read a recipe as an assembly instruction rather than a full account.