For decades the epitome of luxury travel in
Europe was the Orient Express, and that is in no small part due to the exquisite
cuisine served aboard the train, like these lamb cutlets fried in butter with creamy Duchess potatoes. So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as we ride the Orient Express this time on Tasting History. The Orient Express is probably the most famous train in history so it wasn't actually just one train but a long-distance railway service that operated numerous trains all part of the Compagnie internationale des wagons-lits, or International sleeping car company running from Paris to Constantinople, later Istanbul, it enjoyed two golden ages. One was from about 1890 until World War I and the second was between the two world wars, and in both periods one of the most enticing aspects of the journey was the food being served. Now starting in the 1890s and going up really all the way to until World War II the menus on the Orient Express and the other trains operated by the company really heavily relied on the recipes of Auguste Escoffier,
at least when they were operating the trains near the Paris. They included some of his iconic dishes like lobster Thermidor, Peach Melba, jambon à gelée, or ham aspic and there were dozens of different potato and lamb cutlet recipes which is what I'm going to be making today. A plate of his côtelettes d'Agneau à la minute, and one of his most famous recipes pommes de terre Duchesse, or Duchess potatoes. So to make these Duchess potatoes Escoffier says
to start off with a croquet mixture for which you will need 2 and a half pounds, or a little more than 1 kilogram of russet potatoes, 7 tablespoons or 100 grams of butter, 2 teaspoons of salt plus more for the water that we're going to boil the potatoes in, 1 teaspoon of white pepper, a pinch of nutmeg, and one whole egg plus four egg yolks at room temperature. So first cut the potatoes into even sized pieces and then add them to a pot and cover with water. Then add a good amount of salt, about a tablespoon, and bring the water to a boil and let them cook for about 10 minutes until you can pierce them with a knife though Escoffier says that they should still be quite firm at this point. Today usually you would just boil them all the way and and you're done with the cooking, but Escoffier says to first boil and then dry them out in the oven so that's what we're going to do. So drain the potatoes and
then set them on a lined baking sheet, and bake at 400° F, 205° C for another 25 to 30 minutes
or until they're very soft. At this point take them out out and pass them through a strainer. Now this can take quite a while and at certain points you'll be like nothing is happening, but I promise you they will go through if you press them through. You can also use just like a ricer it's going to be a lot faster but it won't be quite as creamy so do it the Escoffier way and press them through a strainer. Then set the pot of potatoes over low heat and add in the butter and stir it in, and then add in the two teaspoons of salt, 1 teaspoon of white pepper, and that large pinch of nutmeg. Stir these all in and then take it off the heat. Now touch the potatoes, and if they're warm that's fine, but if they're quite hot then you need to let them cool down till they are just
warm a little above room temperature because we're going to add the eggs and if you add them when they're too hot they'll scramble and you'll have to start all over. But once the potatoes are just warm add the egg yolks and the whole egg, and mix everything in until it's completely
smooth. Now the exciting part of these potatoes is that you can shape them in different ways and
Escoffier gives us a few options in how to shape them. He says "mould into the form of a small Brioches à Tête,
bread rolls or flat cakes; or pipe out with a piping bag and star tube onto a buttered tray." The Brioches à Tête sounds kind of interesting it would basically be like a little ball of potato with another little ball on top, but the more traditional and frankly more impressive way to do it is to pipe them. So using a star tip pipe large mounds of potato onto a parchment lined baking sheet. This recipe should make between 6 and 10 depending on the size of mounds you want. Also it does help to let the potatoes come to room temperature before piping because they'll they'll be a little firmer and hold their shape better. Also once you've piped them you want them to be even firmer so put them into the refrigerator for about an hour or so uncovered and this will let them be firm enough so that you can brush on some melted butter without ruining all of the the wonderful piping that you just did. Once you've brushed on some melted butter set the tray in the oven again at 400° F for about 25 minutes, or until they are nicely browned on top Now these potatoes while delicious and creamy do have a reputation for being a little dry, and that's because there isn't as much cream and butter as like a mashed potato because they need to hold their shape so they are
usually served with some sort of rather fatty meat and for that today I going to be making côtelettes d'Agneau à la Minute. "Cut the cutlets very thin, season them and shallow fry in very hot clarified butter. Arrange them in a circle on a dish, sprinkle with a little lemon juice and the cooking butter after adding a pinch of chopped parsley. Serve immediately." Simple but delicious, so for this all you'll need is
some very small lamb cutlets, and you want to cut them as thin as possible and you want to get the smallest that you can. You don't want big old lamb chops, as small as you can. Then some clarified butter for frying. You'll also need some juice from fresh lemon and minced parsley for garnish. So season the lamb with a bit of salt and pepper and then heat the clarified butter in a wide pan, and once it hits about 350° F carefully set the lamb in about 3 or 4 pieces at a time. Fry them on one side for 2 or 3 minutes and then flip them over and fry on the other side until the lamb is cooked through, and reaches an internal temperature of 145°. As soon as they're cooked take them out of the butter and set them aside for 2 to 3 minutes just to rest while you transfer your Duchess potatoes onto a plate, and then plate the lamb, sprinkle with a bit of parsley, and drizzle with a bit of the lemon mixed with the butter that the lamb was fried in. That lemon butter is really the best part of this dish. Anyway I love frying things in clarified butter but I can't
imagine doing it on a train, sloshing about as it's as it's going down the rails but that is exactly what the cooks on the Orient Express did. They were cooking while the train was in motion but that's
what you had to do if you wanted to provide your passengers with the freshest haute cuisine available on the rails. And that brings up the question what exactly was it like to ride and dine on the Orient Express? The origin of the Orient Express actually be in America where in 1867 a Belgian civil engineer Georges Nagelmackers rode in one of the new Pullman train cars which were the pinnacle of luxury both in sleeping accommodations and in dining. He was so impressed with these Pullman train cars that he decided to go back to Europe and start a train company with cars that would rival the Pullmans. The issue was that in America you could get on the train and ride for several days uninterrupted but in Europe at the time pretty much all of the train tracks and and the trains were run by individual countries so every time you cross a border you would have to get out
of the train go through customs, take all of your luggage off and then usually get onto a completely different train before going another few hundred miles until you reach the next country but Georges had a plan and he had the contacts to make this plan happen because he was family friends with King Leopold II of Belgium. Now King Leopold II is in many ways one of the greatest monsters in history. He was responsible for millions, possibly like 10 million deaths in the Belgian Congo, but he was also a train enthusiast and he was very powerful and well connected, and that is what Georges needed. So with King Leopold II's help Georges was able to convince all these different countries to work together to allow this one train to go freely between the countries basically all the way across Europe, and after some false starts and a few test runs on a smaller scale the Orient Express made its inaugural trip in October of 1883, sort of because technically the Orient Express couldn't
get from Paris to Constantinople at the time because there weren't train tracks for this last part. So you actually had to go from Paris to a town just south of Bucharest and then you would take a ferry across the Danube to Bulgaria where you would take an entirely different train to Varna
on the Black Sea and once you arrived at Varna you had to take a steam ship to Constantinople. It wasn't until August of 1888 that the train could go unimpeded all the way from Paris to the Ottoman capital, but even in those early years the cuisine was supposedly topnotch, and was definitely something to be talked about. In fact one of the first people to ever ride on that inaugural train who just happened to be a reporter wrote "In the front of the train, the dining car, with its curtain
coquettishly raised, casts an extraordinary luster on the whole scene. Large gas lights illuminate a veritable banquet hall. The tables, side by side, those with four seats on the right, those with two seats on the left, in seven rows, are set up in a most sumptuous manner. The bright white tablecloths and napkins, are artistically folded by the restaurant's sommelier; the crystal-clear sparkle of the glassware, filled with rubies of red wine and topaz of white; the pure crystal decanters and the silver caps of the champagne bottles dazzle the crowd both inside and outside, a contrast to the sorrow of parting seen on their faces." And the dining car wasn't just the restaurant but it also
had a drawing room for the ladies with wonderful plush velvet chairs and then a library/smoking room for the men that had leather arm chairs and bookcases filled with books, maps, and newspapers
which were swapped in and out at each country they passed through. The dining room itself lit by gaslight chandeliers was furnished with wall tapestries, silk drapes and leather and velvet chairs, and there were tables of four and of two and could seat 42 passengers in all. The tables were set with fresh flowers, polished silverware, porcelain china and Baccarat crystal glasses just like you would find in any of the fine Parisian or London hotel restaurants of the day. And because of the international nature of the train the staff in the early years were expected to speak multiple languages usually it was French, German, and English or Italian and sometimes other languages like Turkish. In fact in 1894 it was said that collectively the entire staff on the train could speak 50 different languages and dialects. Now the kitchen staff on the train usually were all French
and they worked in some of the best French Hotel restaurants that Paris had to offer before getting courted and working on the train, and they all worked under the chef du cuisine and in
October of 1883 some someone wrote of the genius of how this chef put together the menu. See as you cross from country to country from France and Austria and Bulgaria and all these other countries the menu would change to reflect the country that you were in. So yes you would still have some French food obviously but you would also have some cuisine from the location that you're at. "This genius of a man... has prepared us dishes of exquisite flavor, with menus varied by the countries which we pass through... Danube sterlet, fresh Romanian caviar, and Turkish pilaf, while the sommelier follows suit, pouring us the most illustrious vintages of the Moselle, the Rhine, of Hungary and Romania." And not only was the food excellent but according to one American traveler it was well priced as well. Cy Warman said the food was "equal to the best in any country, and the rates are reasonable... you have three good meals for $2.55 which in America, in the average dining car, would cost three dollars." Well by golly that is a deal. He was also really impressed with the sleeping arrangements on the train because most trains in the US at that time were kind of done in a dormatory style so you were sleeping right next to someone with just a little curtain between you unless you were paying for like a suite on one of the Pullman trains. But on the Orient Express "A compartment holds two
or four people, and often, with the judicious expenditure of a few francs, the voyager can secure a small compartment all to him himself, and he is quite as secluded and comfortable as he would be in the stateroom of a Pullman or Wagner." Now while we are making an Orient Express dinner the day
of course would have started out with an Orient Express breakfast, and this was usually different kinds of eggs and an assortment of meats and fruit and different pastries but according to Joseph Riley an Englishman who was traveling in 1889 he said most of the passengers just didn't
really eat anything but just drank "a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of wine." And I guess they were on vacation so why shouldn't they have wine for breakfast, and maybe they were just saving room for for lunch because lunch could be 7 to 10 courses and it was supposedly so excellent that if you
were royalty you would get on to eat even if you didn't have anywhere to go. "At Sofia, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria got into the train... It appeared that Prince Ferdinand's pastime was
to join the train in this way, have his déjeuner on board, get out at the frontier and return to his capital by the next train. It seems a curious mode of enjoyment but probably Bulgaria was less lively than it has become since... Anyhow we presently saw some apricot omelettes walking about and asked for some, but we're told that this was a déjeuner commandé and we could not share it, to which deprivation we resigned ourselves." Dinner was similarly delicious but far more fancy because on the train dinner was a black tie affair. Men would would dress in their best and women would put on their best gowns and jewels and and it was very, very formal. Though there was one time on the train that you should eat dinner before you actually get on the train and that is when you are leaving Istanbul to head back to Paris because there was no diner car when it left Istanbul. The diner car didn't actually meet up with it until it got to Bulgaria so just in time for breakfast so make sure to eat before you get on board. Now the first golden age of the Orient Express came to
a rather abrupt halt at the outbreak of World War I. Though one of the dining cars used by the
vagon company actually played a pivotal role when on November 11th 1918 German officers signed
their surrender in a dining car known as the Compiègne Wagon. Unfortunately the Germans used that same dining car in a bit of spite in 1940 whe they demanded the surrender of the French to the
German army during World War II, and it was never used again because Hitler had it blown up when he realized he was going to lose the war just so the Allies couldn't get their hands on it again. Now between these two world wars well that is the second and most glorious golden age of the Orient Express, and in the 1920s just a couple years after it came back into service it was redesigned with steel carriages which offered a more comfortable ride. And they'd also been designed with the modern Art Deco interiors that would come to be so iconic, and this was the train that featured in Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express '. Now when she published that book there had never
been a murder on the Orient Express but I guess she jinxed it because only about a year after she
published it in 1935 somebody was murdered, it was a wealthy Romanian fashion designer. She was robbed and pushed out the window and found on the side of the tracks a little while later. Now 2 years after she published her novel another novelist Beverly Nihcols wrote of actual experience on the train and while it didn't include any murder it did include lunch. "A bell tinkles in the corridor of the Orient Express. Lunch! We get up, with hunger gnawing at our inside, filled with delight at the prospect of
eating crisp rolls and potato mayonnaise, and veal and petit pois and slabs of fromage de pays, wash down by white wine drunk from a tumbler (which is the only way to drink white wine). And not only does the prospect of the food allure us, but the fact that we shall be devouring it in a fantastic chariot of steel and glass, hurling through through a foreign country. There must be something seriously wrong with the man who does not enjoy lunching in the train." Now the second golden age of the train ended at the outbreak of World War II and while it did return to service after the war its golden age never really returned. Partly it was because of the Iron Curtain. Europe was now divided in two and the train traveling through so many Soviet countries became a logistical nightmare when it came to travel visas. Also there was the proliferation of air travel so why take several days to go across Europe when you could take several hours instead. This is not to say that the luxury of the Orient Express ended quite the opposite, in fact it just got more and more luxurious because
the train itself ended up becoming the destination. You didn't take it from Paris to Istanbul because
you needed to get from Paris to Istanbul, you took it because you wanted to ride on the Orient Express. It's kind of like the difference between taking an ocean liner to get from England to New York rather than taking a cruise where you're not really going anywhere, you just want to be on a cruise ship. But the train continued to be in service between Paris and Istanbul until 1977, and still ran other routes until 2009 when it ceased operation. Though in recent years a completely restored version of the Orient Express which is supposed to be really, really luxurious has been out on the tracks again and you can actually ride the Orient Express and supposedly they even try to recreate some of the earlier dishes from the golden age of the Orient Express. Though I don't know if they make these exact Auguste Escoffier recipes that I am about to eat right now. And here we are lamb cutlets fried in butter with creamy Duchess potatoes. So the potatoes you can actually just pick them up but that's not classy so you should cut into them. They're really, really- they look firmer than like a mashed potato. Let's give it a try. That's very hot. x_x I never test the temperature of my food before I eat it it's a really bad habit and it often burns my mouth. I have no patience I guess, quite warm but once I got past the burning the texture is actually really nice. They are dryer than like a mashed potato but they're also creamier at the same time. Like the texture is so soft and smooth because we pressed it through through the sieve. When it comes to the flavor they're really, really rich like you can really taste all of that butter in
there. They're often made with cream today. It's like part cream, part butter um so that might
change the the texture but these with with all the butter and the egg they're just so rich, but it does need some of that fat from from the lamb which I'm going to try right now, especially when
you drizzle on that l lemon butter, so good. Here we go. That lemon butter is heavenly. They're perfectly cooked. Like I said you want to get them nice and thin because they're too thick they'll start to burn on the outside before it's totally cooked all the way through, and you don't really want any char or anything like that, you want it tender all the way through. They're so flavorful. I could eat like a dozen of these 'cus they're so small but on the train this would have been one of like seven or eight courses so you would just want to take a couple bites and then move on to the next dish. I didn't make seven or eight courses so I'll be eating all
of these. They're absolutely wonderful if you like lamb which I do fantastic, and I'm going to put both of these recipes up on the tasting history website, tastinghistory.com which I made with help from today's sponsor Squarespace. Squarespace makes building a website so easy with their dynamic tools like their drag and drop technology for both desktop and for mobile and they have lots of
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