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French Potato Cakes
Mash 3 boiled potatoes with 2 ounces of butter, some grated cheese,--a heaping tablespoonful,--salt, pepper, and 5 beaten eggs. Form this into flat cakes, and fry in boiling fat. Serve as a border, or in a mound, with some parsley along the edge.
A short French garnish recipe of the croquette family, written for cooks who were expected to know what "boiling fat" meant. Two things need attention: the egg ratio and the frying medium.
- The egg ratio is the hingeFive beaten eggs to three potatoes produces a loose, batter-like mixture, not something you can pat into a cake by hand. Either use large floury potatoes, drain and dry them well over low heat before mashing, and chill the mixture thoroughly, or drop it by spoonfuls into the fat and accept a fritter rather than a formed cake.
- Butter measurementTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons, half a stick. It goes in while the potatoes are still hot so it melts through the mash.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means deep fat at frying heat, roughly 365-375F. Lard or clarified drippings would have been standard; any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The cheeseAn unspecified "grated cheese" in a French context of this period most likely points to a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan or Gruyere. A heaping tablespoon is a modest amount, there for savour rather than stretch, so use something with flavour.
- Potato choiceRussets or another floury variety mash dry and hold together. Waxy potatoes give a gluey, wet mixture that will spit and disintegrate in hot fat.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities would make roughly eight small cakes. "As a border" means arranged in a ring around a roast or ragout on the platter, with the parsley along the edge, a common way of presenting vegetables on a platter in this period.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: the American cook travelling in Europe and bringing dishes home in abbreviated form. That may account for the terseness here. The dish itself sits in the large French family of fried potato preparations that runs from simple galettes de pommes de terre to the choux-enriched pommes dauphine; the heavy proportion of egg here does much of the binding work, though without the flour paste that makes dauphine puff. The instruction to serve it as a border rather than a dish in its own right is a good marker of period, when potatoes of this kind were often used to ring a platter of meat.