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Potatoes, Mount Vernon
Peel, wash and dry well three large, sound raw potatoes. Cut them crosswise into slices a quarter of an inch thick.
Heat in a large frying pan three tablespoons leaf lard; lay in the potatoes carefully, one beside another; season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cook them for five minutes on each side, or until a good golden colour; then place the pan in a hot oven and bake for ten minutes. Remove, arrange them crown-shape on a hot dish and serve.
A plain pan-roasted potato slice, but the method depends on two things the original assumes: a heavy pan that can go from burner to oven, and slices cut thick enough to hold their shape.
- The hinge: dry the potatoesSurface water is what keeps the slices from browning and makes the lard spit. Pat each slice dry after washing, and lay them in a single layer as the recipe directs, one beside another, so they fry rather than steam.
- "Hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F. The ten minutes in the oven is there to cook the centres through after the outsides have coloured, so the pan should go straight from the burner into a fully preheated oven.
- Leaf lardRendered fat from around the pig's kidneys, mild and clean-tasting; still sold by butchers and some specialty grocers. Ordinary lard, bacon fat, or clarified butter will all do the job, though butter alone may scorch at frying heat.
- The panCast iron or another oven-safe skillet is required, since the same pan goes into the oven. Three tablespoons of fat in a large pan is a shallow fry, not a deep one, so the slices sit directly on the metal and brown there.
- Slice thicknessA quarter inch is deliberate. Thinner slices will be chips by the time the oven stage is done; a mandoline or a steady knife keeps them even so they cook at the same rate.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt for three potatoes is generous by modern habit, more so if you substitute a salted fat such as bacon drippings. Season half at the start and adjust at the table.
- White pepperConventionally chosen so as not to fleck pale dishes with dark specks. Black pepper will serve if that is what is on hand, though the flavour is not identical.
- Yield and servingThree large potatoes serve three or four as a side. The "crown-shape" arrangement means overlapping the slices in a ring around the edge of a warmed platter; they soften quickly, so plate and serve without delay.
The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its hundreds of short entries follow the restaurant convention of naming a dish after a place, a patron, or a person of note. "Mount Vernon" attaches George Washington's Virginia estate to what is otherwise a straightforward pan-roasted potato; Washington's name was attached to a number of dishes in American hotel and cookbook writing of the period, and there is no indication in the recipe that it has any connection to the estate itself. What the recipe does record is the pre-electric kitchen's habit of moving one heavy pan from range top to oven, and the use of lard -- leaf lard being the prized grade -- as a frying fat in American kitchens before vegetable shortenings became common.