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Potatoes, Dauphine
Pour a gill cold milk into a small saucepan, add one tablespoon melted butter, stir well, and when it comes to a boil add one and a half ounces sifted flour, stir well; break in one whole egg, stir briskly; add another egg, briskly stir. Now add two quite large, freshly boiled potatoes. Mash, thoroughly stir; break in another egg, briskly stir again. Season with a teaspoon salt, half saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix well while cooking for two minutes. With a tablespoon take up as much as the spoon can hold of the preparation and immediately drop it into boiling fat; rapidly proceed in like manner with the rest of the preparation and fry for ten minutes, gently turning with the skimmer. Remove, thoroughly drain on a cloth. Dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is classical pommes dauphine: choux paste beaten into potato purée and deep fried. The recipe reads as one long stir, but there are two distinct stages and the transition between them is where it succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: cool the paste before the eggsThe flour is cooked into the boiling milk and butter to make a panade, exactly as for choux. Take the pan off the heat and let it drop below scalding before beating in the first egg, or the eggs set into threads and the paste will not puff.
- A gill and a saltspoonA gill is 1/2 cup (120 ml). A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so "half saltspoon" of cayenne and of nutmeg is roughly 1/8 teaspoon each.
- One and a half ounces flourAbout 1/3 cup by volume, though weighing is more reliable here; the paste should pull away from the sides of the pan in a single mass.
- Potatoes"Two quite large" is roughly 1 lb of floury potatoes, boiled and still hot. Rice or mash them dry and lump-free before they go in; a wet or gluey purée will slacken the paste and the fritters will collapse in the fat.
- A teaspoon of salt is a lotWith three eggs and a pound of potatoes it is defensible, but salt the potato water lightly if you follow it as written, and taste before frying.
- Fat temperature and timeFry at 340-350F (170-175C). Ten minutes at that heat will darken them past pleasant; spoonfuls this size are done in 4 to 6 minutes, when they have puffed, turned once, and gone deep gold. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop below 325F.
- ShapingTwo spoons make cleaner quenelles than one: scoop with one, push off with the other, straight into the fat. Wet the spoons to keep the paste from sticking.
- Draining and yieldDrain on paper rather than a cloth. The quantity gives a good many spoon-sized fritters, and they must go to table at once.
Pommes dauphine belong to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of potato preparations built on pâte à choux, the same cooked paste used for éclairs and gougères; folded into dry potato purée and deep fried, it gives a fritter that is hollow and light rather than dense like a croquette. The name is generally traced to the dauphine, the wife of the heir to the French throne, and belongs to the same courtly naming habit that produced pommes duchesse and pommes marquise; it is often confused with the Dauphiné region, which lends its name instead to the baked gratin dauphinois. Its appearance in an English-language collection of this period reflects how thoroughly professional kitchens worked from French method — the recipe itself gives no explanation of choux paste, assuming a reader who already knew what a paste that leaves the side of the pan should look like.