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Potatoes, Marquise
Prepare a potato brioche preparation. Slide a dentilated fancy tube at the bottom of a pastry bag, drop the potato preparation into it. Have a lightly buttered tin ready and press down the potato preparation in the tin to six rose-like forms; set them in the oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish and serve.
This entry assumes you have already made the book's "potato brioche preparation" — a stiff duchesse-style mixture of dry riced potato, butter and egg yolk. Everything here depends on that base being dry enough to hold a piped shape.
- The base mixtureBake or boil floury potatoes, drain and dry them thoroughly over low heat, then rice them and beat in butter and egg yolks while hot. The book's own potato brioche entry governs the proportions; as a rough guide, something like 2 lb potatoes, 3 tablespoons butter and 3 egg yolks gives a paste stiff enough to pipe. Wet potato collapses in the oven.
- "Dentilated fancy tube"A star tip. A large open star, about half an inch across, gives the ridged rosettes the name calls for.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Ten minutes suggests a fairly hot oven, somewhere in the region of 425F, so that the ridges take colour before the interior dries out; in a moderate oven the rosettes are more likely simply to warm through and stay pale.
- Buttered tinUse a heavy baking sheet, buttered as directed, and pipe with a little space between forms. Chilling the piped rosettes for fifteen minutes before baking helps them keep their definition.
- Marquise vs. DuchesseIn classical practice the marquise garnish is duchesse potato tinted and flavoured with a spoonful of thick tomato purée, which is what distinguishes it from a plain piped rosette. The book's text omits this; add a tablespoon or two of very reduced tomato purée to the base if you want the version the name implies.
- Yield and servingSix rosettes. They function as a garnish rather than a side dish, and the instruction to dress them on a hot dish points to their going straight from oven to table.
Piped potato garnishes belong to the era of formal service that this book documents, when a roast or a grilled cut arrived ringed with decorative accompaniments rather than plated with a spoonful of mash. The family is built on pommes duchesse — dried riced potato bound with butter and egg yolk — from which cooks derived a long list of named variants distinguished mainly by shape or a single added flavouring: dauphine with choux paste, marquise with tomato, and so on. The aristocratic naming was a convention of nineteenth-century French kitchen vocabulary and generally does not point to any particular marquise. The instruction to "dress on a hot dish" is a reminder of how these books were used: the cook was expected to know the base preparation by heart, and the entry needed only to record the tube, the shape and the count.