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To Boil and Mash White Potatoes
Boil and mash white potatoes and arrange them in a mound upon a fireproof platter.. Take out a cupful of potato from the top of the mound, leaving a cavity in the center. Brush the mound and the inside of the cavity with the white of an egg and set in the oven to brown. Melt a half cupful of butter, stir into it four tablespoonfuls of grated cheese and when this melts, pour it gradually upon the beaten yolks of two eggs. Season to taste and stir over the fire until very hot and like thick cream. Draw the potato to the door of the oven, pour the cheese sauce into the cavity, sift crumbs over the entire mound and return to the oven for five minutes before sending to the table.
A duchesse-style potato mound with a cheese custard poured into its hollow, meant as a garnish-course side for roast game. The whole thing hinges on the sauce, which is a yolk emulsion and will curdle if it gets near a simmer.
- The sauce must never boilButter, cheese and two yolks stirred "over the fire" behaves much like a hollandaise. Use a double boiler or the lowest possible flame, stir constantly, and pull it off as soon as it coats the spoon like thick cream. If it breaks it turns to buttery scrambled egg, and it is hard to bring back once it is in the cavity.
- Quantity of potatoNo amount is given. About 2 1/2 to 3 lb of floury potatoes (russets or similar) makes a mound that will hold its shape and serve four to six. Mash them dry, without milk, or the mound slumps.
- Fireproof platterOvenproof earthenware or stoneware, sold for taking dishes straight from oven to table. A shallow gratin dish or a metal-handled oval baker does the same job.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. Brown the egg-washed mound at 425F for 10 to 15 minutes, then drop to 375F for the final five minutes with the crumbs on. Higher than that and the egg white glaze scorches before it gilds.
- Grated cheeseMost likely a dry grating cheese such as Parmesan, or a well-aged dry cheddar. Modern pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and will make the sauce grainy. Grate it yourself and add it off direct heat.
- "Draw the potato to the door of the oven"With a coal range you slid the dish forward to work on it in the residual heat. Simply pull the oven rack out, fill the cavity, crumb the mound, and slide it back.
- Sifting crumbsFine dry breadcrumbs pushed through a sieve, not fresh soft crumbs. Five minutes is not long enough for them to colour on their own, so dot them with a little butter first.
- TimingBuild the mound and bake it first, and make the sauce only when the potato is browned and ready. A yolk sauce held warm for any length of time will thicken past pouring or split.
This is pommes duchesse in form: mashed potato bound and glazed with egg, piped or moulded into a shape and browned in the oven. The cheese filling is of a piece with the butter-cheese-and-yolk mixtures related to Welsh rarebit and to hollandaise that turned up as fillings for everything from ramekins to pastry cases. The instruction to use a "fireproof platter" is also telling: heat-resistant ceramic and glass table ware that could go from oven to dining room was a selling point, and cookbooks name it deliberately.