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Potatoes, Gastronome
Peel and cut in halves eight medium, sound raw potatoes, lay them on a towel, cut side downward, then with a column cutter half inch in diameter cut out as many round pieces as you can; wash and drain well, place them in a saucepan with a quart of cold water and a teaspoon salt, and boil for fifteen minutes. Drain out the water from the pan, then add two gills demi-glace, two tablespoons sherry, two saltspoons salt, two saltspoons white pepper and one very small and exceedingly fine chopped truffle; gently mix. Cover the pan, set in the oven for twenty minutes, remove, pour into a hot dish and serve.
A garnish-style potato dish from the era when a kitchen brigade could afford to turn eight potatoes into a handful of neat cylinders and think nothing of the scraps. The success of it rests on the demi-glace, not the potato.
- The hinge: parboil lessHalf-inch potato cylinders do not need fifteen minutes of hard boiling; they will be waterlogged or collapsing by then, and they still have twenty minutes in the oven ahead of them. Boil five to seven minutes, until barely yielding at the edge, and drain well.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of demi-glace. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons each of salt and white pepper is half a teaspoon of each — the pepper is assertive by modern taste and worth halving on a first attempt.
- Column cutterA half-inch column cutter or apple corer, pushed lengthwise through the halved potato, gives the cylinders. A small round cutter works; so does simply cutting even batons and trimming the corners. The offcuts are perfectly good for mash or soup.
- Oven heatNo oven temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the covered twenty minutes suits the purpose; the goal is to finish the potatoes in the sauce, not to brown them.
- Demi-glaceThis means the real thing: brown veal stock reduced with espagnole to a glossy, lightly gelatinous sauce. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate, diluted to sauce consistency, is the practical route. Plain beef broth will not coat the potatoes and the dish falls flat.
- TruffleThe recipe asks only for one very small truffle, chopped exceedingly fine, and does not specify the kind. A teaspoon of minced preserved truffle or truffle peelings, added with their juice at the end of the oven time, is closer in effect than truffle oil, which does not hold up under heat.
- SherryA dry amontillado or fino, not cream sherry. Two tablespoons in a cup of demi-glace is enough to read as aroma; with the pan covered, not all of the alcohol will cook off.
- YieldEight potatoes reduced to cylinders serves about four as a side dish. The recipe gives no serving suggestion and does not say what it should accompany.
"Gastronome" appears as a garnish name in the French classical repertoire, generally associated with truffles, madeira and a brown sauce — the vocabulary of the restaurant kitchen rather than the household one, where a named garnish told a waiter and a cook the same thing without further explanation. The recipe's real subject is demi-glace: a house that kept a stockpot going could turn boiled potatoes into a dish worth a name, and the cylinder cutter is there so every piece looks identical on the plate, the kind of labor that made sense only where trimmings went straight into the soup and the staff meal. The International Cook Book belongs to the wave of turn-of-the-century American volumes that gathered French professional cookery alongside dishes claimed from every nation, aimed at readers who had eaten in hotel dining rooms and wanted the same thing at home.