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Potatoes, Laure
Finely slice six raw, peeled, medium potatoes. Wash, drain and plunge in boiling fat for five minutes, remove and drain on a cloth. Lightly butter a baking dish, arrange a layer of potatoes in the dish, season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon white pepper. Sprinkle a teaspoon of grated Parmesan cheese over, place a few little bits butter on top, arrange another layer of potatoes, sprinkle with cheese as before, repeat until the potatoes are all finished, then set in oven to bake thirty minutes, remove and serve.
A gratin built on potatoes that are fried before they are baked, which is the point of the dish and the reason it behaves differently from a cream-bound gratin. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield.
- The hinge: fry first, then bakeThe five minutes in hot fat sets the outside of each slice so the layers stay distinct rather than collapsing into a mash. Fry at about 325F in batches so the fat does not drop in temperature, and let the slices go limp and pale gold, not brown; they finish colouring in the oven.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is a half teaspoon of salt and one saltspoon a quarter teaspoon of white pepper. The recipe gives these amounts within the instruction for the first layer and does not say whether they are repeated for each layer or meant for the whole dish. Either reading is light for six potatoes plus cheese; season each layer as you go and taste a fried slice before you commit.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, is right for thirty minutes; the potatoes are already cooked through, so you are only melting the cheese and crisping the top.
- Slicing"Finely slice" means about an eighth of an inch, thin enough to cook through in five minutes of frying. A mandoline gives even slices, which matters more here than in a cream gratin since there is no liquid to even out the cooking.
- Wash and drain thoroughlyRinsing removes surface starch so the slices do not glue together in the fat, but any water left on them will spit violently. Dry them well on a towel before they go in.
- Fat for fryingThe book says only 'boiling fat' and does not specify which. Deep frying of this period was commonly done in lard or beef fat. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; olive oil is not the best choice at this temperature.
- CheeseA teaspoon of grated Parmesan per layer is restrained by modern habit. Use real Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana, grated fine so it melts rather than sitting in shreds.
- YieldSix medium potatoes serve four as a side dish, three if the dish is the centre of a light supper. Bake in a shallow dish rather than a deep one so the top layer crisps.
Potato dishes carrying a woman's name — Anna, Suzette, Laure — are a habit of nineteenth-century French restaurant cooking, where a garnish or preparation was routinely tagged with a name and then travelled through the professional repertoire, though in many cases who was being honoured is now uncertain. Pommes Anna, the closely related dish of buttered layered potatoes baked in a covered pan, is the best known of the family; this one differs in that the slices are blanched in deep fat first and bound with Parmesan rather than butter alone. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a cook and manager at Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects exactly that kind of hotel kitchen: French technique, an Italian cheese, and a dozen named variations on the potato because a large restaurant needed them.