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March 29
Menu: Printanier Soup; Broiled Chicken, Oyster Sauce; Duchesse Potatoes; String Beans; Watercress, French Dressing; Cheese Biscuits; Lemon Meringue Pie; Coffee Duchesse Potatoes-Wash, peel and boil two pounds potatoes, drain off water and dry in oven, then rub through sieve, add 3 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon cream, seasoning salt, pepper and grated nutmeg. When well mixed lay on floured board and divide into 12 pieces, shape each piece into a square, put them on a buttered tin, brush over with beaten egg and bake in hot oven till well browned.
A straightforward duchesse mixture, unusual only in that it is shaped by hand into squares rather than piped. The whole dish depends on getting the potato dry before anything wet goes into it.
- Dry the potato properlyThis is the hinge. After draining, return the potatoes to the hot pan or a low oven for a few minutes until the surface steam has gone and they look chalky. Wet potato gives a slack mixture that spreads and browns unevenly.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 425-450F. The pieces are already cooked through, so the oven is only setting the egg glaze and browning the surface: 15-20 minutes is usually enough.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotion, so shortening appears where an older cookbook would say butter. Two tablespoons of butter gives more flavour and browns better; the quantity is small either way.
- Rub through a sieveA potato ricer or a food mill does this faster and with less risk of overworking. Do not use a food processor or blender, which turns cooked potato gluey.
- Choice of potatoUse a floury variety such as russet or Maris Piper. Waxy potatoes hold too much moisture and the mixture will not take a shape.
- Egg yolksThree yolks to two pounds of potato is what holds the squares together. Add them while the potato is still warm but not steaming hot, so they thicken rather than scramble.
- Shaping and the tinFlour the board lightly; too much dulls the flavour. Parchment on the sheet works better than butter alone, which can scorch at this temperature. Chilling the shaped squares for 20 minutes before glazing helps them keep their edges.
- YieldTwelve pieces, so two or three each as a side dish for four to six. They can be shaped and refrigerated a day ahead, then glazed and baked to order.
Duchesse potatoes are a French preparation, generally traced to nineteenth-century professional kitchens, where sieved potato enriched with egg yolk was piped into borders and rosettes to edge a platter of meat or fish; the hand-shaped squares here need no pastry bag. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to introduce hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and its recipes characteristically call for Crisco in places where butter or lard would otherwise be used.