Pommes Anna

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A slightly simplified version, cooked in lots of butter.

Pommes Anna or Anna potatoes, is a classic French dish of sliced, layered potatoes cooked in a very large amount of melted butter. For that reason (even though the butter is eventually discarded), and because the initial preparation is quite meticulous and labor intensive, they are seldom prepared today in their original fashion. There are numerous modern recipes that are somewhat easier to prepare and that use much less butter.

The dish is generally credited with having been created during the time of Napoleon III by the chef Adolphe Dugléré, a pupil of Carême, when he was head chef at the Café Anglais, the leading Paris restaurant of the 19th century and named for one of the grandes cocottes of the period. (There is disagreement for which of three possibilities the dish was named - the actress Anna Damiens, known as Anna Judic, Anna Deslions or Anna Untel.)^[1] A special double baking dish made of copper called la cocotte à pommes Anna is still manufactured in France for the cooking of this dish. It consists of upper and lower halves which fit into each other so that the whole vessel with its contents can be inverted during cooking. At the end of the cooking period, the dish is unmoulded and forms a cake 6 to 8 inches in diameter and about 2 inches high.^[2]