Anna's potatoes - who was Anna and are you up to this?
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
"the supreme potato dish of all time" Julia Child and Simone Beck
I have no idea now how Potatoes Anna, crept into my Ideas list. I thought it might have been a Felicity Cloake 'perfect' dish but no. Never mind I decided I really had to tackle some of these long ago 'Ideas' so here I am with Pommes - or more correctly Pommes de terre - Anna. The picture is from my rather wonderful, but basically ignored by the internet The Cooking of France - published by Bay Books with recipes from people I have never heard of. And none of them online. But all the classics are there, and it's beautifully produced.
So this is their Pommes Anna, made from a recipe - which quite correctly - has just two ingredients - butter - lots of it - and potatoes.
Fundamentally the butter is clarified, the potatoes are sliced thinly and then layered in the hot butter, cooked in the oven and eventually turned out on to a plate. Well no - to be really authentic you have to have a specific pan made just for this dish. If you want to know absolutely everything anyone would want to know about this pan - and the dish - you can check out the Vintage French Copper website. It's somehow wonderful is it not, that people can be so fascinated by obscure things? Daniel Gritzer of Serious Eats, suggested you needed to be a billionaire to buy one.
The pan would help in the making for it's extremely pernickety to make - as described by Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen in her introduction to her inauthentic Cacio e pepe Pommes Anna:
"a classic French dish of thinly sliced potatoes cooked in a significant amount of clarified butter, layered to form a cake that’s flipped in a pan on the stove every 10 minutes until the outside is golden and crispy. A potato galette is for people who live their lives outside restaurant kitchens — or, perhaps, have a curly-haired tyrant named Anna in their lives."
For yes, hers is a galette and indeed the Pommes Anna is a galette - not the pastry kind, but the kind whereby the ingredients are layered, sometimes cooked, sometimes not - but served looking like the above. And it is inauthentic because it has cheese and black pepper - hence the title, which according to her:
"looks like a crown of potatoes and tastes a tiny bit like a potato chip casserole, with deeply bronzed and crisp edges and a baked-just-so center, infused with salty cheese and a warming kick of pepper." Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen
Daniel Gritzer of Serious Eats, when introducing his simplified Pommes Anna - also had words to say on the difficulty of it all:
"Traditional recipes call for a finicky and failure-prone approach of building the cake in a hot pan, with the cook having to meticulously arrange the potato slices as they fry in scalding butter. It's a questionable method on the best of days, one that, yes, with regular practice can be perfected. But it's not the kind of dish most home cooks are likely to make often—certainly not often enough to get to the point where failure isn't a distinct possibility. How can pommes Anna go wrong? Oh, let's see:"
And he then goes on to list a whole series of catastrophic events such as splashing boiling butter all over yourself.
But then Jamie of Jamie and Julia - my favourite amateur cook in that he makes mistakes but carries on regardless - manages to pull it all off - just - even using a mandoline for the first time, layering the potato slices in the boiling butter, and flipping it all out at the end - without too much of a disaster. Just a slight bit of slippage - but as he says at the end, who cares what it looks like when it tastes so good. Julia didn't do the flipping as it cooked process though. I really think you need that special pan for that. So if you haven't got a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cookery - watch this 10 minute video and learn how to do it the Julia Child way., whilst being reassured that yes you can do it too.
So who indeed is Anna? And who invented this classic dish. Well I'll just repeat what Wikipedia and everybody else, copying from Wikipedia says - but with pictures - and tell you that it's recipe devised by Adolphe Dugléré, an apprentice of Carême who went on to be a star of the Napoleon III restaurant scene - his most famous establishment being the Café Anglais. And Anna? Well she was one of two courtesans - well one is described as a comic actress - Anna Judic (her stage name) - her real name was Anne-Marie Louis Damiens. And the second Anna - Anne Deslions who really was a courtesan and a favourite of Napoleon II himself. Here they all are:
Nobody really seems to have a story as to why the name was given to this particular dish - I mean potatoes. Although rather glorious potatoes. The nearest I got to that was that it was a thing at the time of Napoleon III - naming dishes after courtesans - or cocottes as the French called them.
Perhaps the most beautiful version of Pommes Anna that I saw was from our own Nagi Maehashi of Recipe Tin Eats - well actually a guest chef J. B. Alexandre who tells us that:
"Pommes Anna cannot exist without clarified butter! That is what makes the potato crispy – regular butter wouldn’t achieve the same amount of crispiness."
And Julia Child too insisted on the clarified butter - which Jamie bought rather than made - well ghee is clarified butter is it not? So you too can buy it ready made. No need for tricky separation of butter and milk solids - unless you let the butter harden first.
Looking at that perfect pattern on the Recipe Tin Eats version reminds me that if you are really cheffy you have to make your potato slices perfectly round and all the same size. Poor Jamie tried to do this by slicing bits off the edges of the potato but ended up with octagons rather than circles. I suspect you need yet another rare cooking implement to be able to achieve perfect rounds. Daniel Gritzer got over this problem by simply making the bottom layer - which becomes the top - of perfectly round slices. After all you don't see the shape of slices in the other layers, and then you don't have to figure out what to do with the leftover bits of potato. Jamie had lots.
It seems to me that today the inclination is to cook it all in the oven - yes to the clarified butter mostly - and not to worry about turning it over and over whilst cooking. And yes it is today, and so we can't help fiddling - as did the Smitten Kitchen lady with her cacio e pepe version. So here are a few to consider.
Two which keep the basic principle and shape but add in a few extras: Pommes Anna - Lorraine Elliott of Not Quite Nigella - who swears by vinegar salt, and tops hers with sour cream, caviar and dill; Pommes Anna - Jamie Oliver/delicious. who also adds in some horseradish, truffle oil and Gruyère and suggests that:
"This recipe is brilliant served with a ploughman's platter of your favourite cheeses, cured meats and a crisp apple and walnut salad."
Most people seem to think that Pommes Anna go best with steak.
Then there are those who go for individual serves of Pommes anna - with varying degrees of fanciness: Pommes Anna - Gladkokken a Norwegian cook who adds thyme & garlic - as do many others, and who shapes his as little rosettes: 'Pommes Anna' stacks cooked with duck fat - i cook stuff - well that's a break from butter, so very non classic; and for the 'ordinary cook' from Sarah Hobbs Individual pommes Anna - possibly from Coles, but found on the Taste website.
Then there are two real outliers - Vegan pommes Anna rosette with harissa - Kitchen and Other Stories - well vegan - so no butter, although of course you can substitute butter, potatoes - two different kinds of potatoes, one of which seems to be orange in colour, harissa! and with the potatoes standing on end. And then apparently in LA there is a restaurant called Camphor run by a Thai and an Indian who ran Alain Ducasse's Singapore restaurant - who have devised this very haute cuisine dish of
"a Pommes Anna that layers potatoes and celeriac with brown butter and a chaat spice mix of fennel seed, star anise, cinnamon and cardamom. It is menued with a choice of three sauces: mint-parsley purée, garlicky yogurt and tamarind chutney."
Well it was invented as an haute cuisine dish, and it is a bit of a faff. Not too much though. I reckon if you can make a gratin Dauphinois you can probably have a go at some of the simpler recipes. Just pour the butter over the potatoes when you've sliced them and make sure you pour off the hot butter before you flip it onto a plate.
YEARS GONE BY
August 24
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2018 - Nothing
2016 - I don't cook much anymore
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