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Potatoes, Voisin
Peel and wash four medium, sound potatoes, then finely slice them. Mix on a plate a teaspoon salt with half teaspoon white pepper and two saltspoons grated nutmeg. Lightly butter a round earthen dish, arrange half the quantity potatoes, sprinkle half the mixed seasoning and dredge two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese over them; arrange balance potatoes on top and sprinkle with the rest of the seasoning. Moisten with a gill of white broth, tightly cover the dish, place in the oven and bake for forty minutes. Remove and send to the table without uncovering.
A spare, broth-based potato gratin that depends on thin slicing and a genuinely tight seal. No temperature is given, so the reader has to supply it.
- Oven temperatureThe book leaves it unstated. Forty minutes covered suits a moderate oven, 350-375F. Below that the slices will still be firm at the center.
- A gillHalf a cup in American measure, five fluid ounces in British. It looks scant against four potatoes, and it is meant to: the potatoes steam in it rather than swim.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of nutmeg is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for this dish.
- White brothA light unsalted veal or chicken stock, not browned and not reduced. Use low-sodium stock, since the recipe already carries a full teaspoon of salt.
- Slice thinness"Finely slice" here means roughly an eighth of an inch or less; a mandoline is the easy route. Thick slices will not cook through in forty minutes on so little liquid.
- Do not rinse after slicingThe potatoes are washed before slicing, not after. Leaving the cut surfaces unrinsed is generally held to help the layers hold together rather than fall into a loose pile.
- The sealEverything rests on the lid. If the earthenware dish has no tight cover, use foil crimped hard to the rim, and resist lifting it to check.
- CheeseTwo tablespoons of Parmesan goes only in the middle layer; nothing browns on top, since the dish never uncovers. This is a seasoning, not a crust.
- YieldFour medium potatoes serves four as a side dish. Double it in a wider dish rather than a deeper one, or the center will lag.
The name points to Restaurant Voisin, at the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue Cambon in Paris, one of the grand nineteenth-century houses whose kitchen lent its name to a long list of garnishes and preparations that traveled into international cookbooks. Attachment of a restaurant's name to a dish was a common shorthand of the period, though what a cook of the time understood by "Voisin" is not something this page tells us. What distinguishes this potato dish from the cream-and-garlic gratins better known today is its restraint — broth instead of cream, Parmesan instead of Gruyère, and nutmeg carrying most of the flavor. The instruction to send the dish to the table still covered may well be a small piece of restaurant service surviving into a home recipe.