Enough mealy potatoes to make a good dish, boiled dry.
2 table-spoonfuls of cream.
1 table-spoonful of butter.
Salt and pepper.
2 eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately.
Whip up the potatoes, while hot, with a silver fork, instead of using the potato-beetle. This is, by the way, a much better method of mashing potato than that usually adopted. The potato is dried of all superfluous moisture, made whiter and lighter than by pounding. When it is fine and mealy, beat in the cream, the butter, salt, pepper, and whip up to a creamy heap before mixing in, with few dexterous strokes, the whites, which should be first whipped stiff. Pile irregularly upon a buttered pie-dish; brown quickly in the oven; slip carefully, with the help of a cake-turner, to a heated flat dish, and send up.
Potatoes à la Duchesse.
When you cook potatoes à l’Italienne prepare more than will be needed for one day. Cut the remnants, when perfectly cold, into squares or rounds with a cake-cutter, wet in cold water. Grease the bottom of a baking-pan and set these in it in rows, but not touching one another, and bake quickly, brushing them all over, except, of course, on the bottom, with beaten egg when they begin to brown. Lay a napkin, folded, upon a hot dish, and range these regularly upon it.
They are very fine, and considered quite a fancy dish.