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Potatoes, Duchesse
Prepare a potato puree. Divide it into six equal parts. Spread a little flour on a corner of a table, roll each piece of potato in the flour, then give to each a nice heart-shaped form; nicely criss-cross their surfaces with a knife. Butter a small pastry pan with a teaspoon butter, arrange the potatoes over, lightly butter their surface. Place the pan in a hot oven and bake for ten minutes, or until of a fine golden colour. Remove from the oven and with a skimmer lift them up and place on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to make the pomme purée it starts from. The success of it lies almost entirely in how dry and how rich that purée is.
- The purée is the whole dishThe purduchesse mixture is normally an enriched pur e: bake or boil floury potatoes, dry them out over low heat until the pan looks chalky, rice them, then beat in butter and egg yolks — roughly 2 yolks and 2 oz butter per 2 lb potatoes. Note that this recipe specifies only "a potato puree" and no yolks; here the flour coating and a very dry pur e are doing much of the holding.
- Keep water outAny wetness left in the potato makes a paste that will not hold a scored edge. Milk or cream should be added sparingly if at all; the fat and yolk do the binding.
- "A hot oven"Read that as 425-450F. Ten minutes at that heat sets and colours the surface without drying the interior. If your oven runs cool, finish under the broiler for a moment rather than extending the bake.
- Chilling before bakingThe recipe shapes and bakes immediately. Shaped potatoes hold their form far better if they rest 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator first, and they can be shaped several hours ahead.
- The flour and the criss-crossThe flour is only to keep the mixture from sticking to your hands and the table; use as little as will do. The scored surface exists to catch colour, so brush the ridges with melted butter or an egg wash before they go in.
- "A small pastry pan"A rimmed baking sheet. Butter it well or line it with parchment — a skimmer will tear the bases off if they have caught.
- Piping instead of shapingThe same mixture is commonly piped through a large star tube into rosettes or a border. The heart shapes here are one of several conventional forms.
- YieldSix pieces, so one apiece for six as a garnish alongside a roast or grill, or three or four as a side dish.
- The folded napkinA period service detail — the linen absorbs steam and butter so the potatoes do not sit in a slick. A warmed platter does the same job.
Pommes duchesse belong to the codified French garnish repertoire that professional kitchens carried into English- and American-language cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, where an enriched potato purée bound with egg yolk is piped or moulded, gilded in the oven and used to border entrées and roasts. The name is generally traced to the same courtly habit of naming garnishes after ranks and personages that gave us pommes dauphine and sauce Soubise, though no particular duchess is documented behind it. Recipes of the period are typically brief, presenting the dish in a few lines and assuming that a purée de pommes de terre was already understood and needed no explanation.