Julia Child's Iconic 2-Ingredient Potato Dish Is Not Mashed

Julia Child's legendary culinary career was all about her love of French food and sharing how to make it. So naturally, Child's favorite soup was a three-ingredient French classic, and she called a famous stew from France the best in the world. One of the many iconic dishes Child featured on her groundbreaking cooking show, "The French Chef," was Pommes Anna, which requires just two ingredients: potatoes and butter.

Pommes Anna is made of potato slices layered with butter in a round shape, creating a petal-like top. Child demonstrated the elegant dish's traditional cooking technique, which isn't as simple as its ingredients. The potatoes are trimmed into a cylinder and cut into 1/8th- to 1/16-inch slices, making them roughly the same diameter and width. Clarified butter is used, since regular butter is more likely to burn and can make the potato slices stick to the pan.

Child cooked her Pommes Anna in a cast-iron skillet, saying a heavy pan helps create its browned top and sides and soft interior. The tricky part is that the potatoes are layered while the pan is over an active burner. Some melted clarified butter is warmed in the pan, then the slices are placed overlapping each other in one circle around the outside and another on the inside with one slice in the center. As the bottom browns, the layers continue, with butter added between each, then the pan goes in a hot oven. The final dicey part is flipping the cooked Pommes Anna onto a plate, making the bottom's golden-brown arranged slices the top.

The classic way Julia Child made Pommes Anna has several potential pitfalls. Trying to arrange the potato slices in the pan over the burner risks bubbling hot butter splashing on your hands. The first potato layer can also burn if you don't do the other layers quickly. The bottom layer sticking is always a risk even when you periodically shake the pan as you're supposed to, and it even happened to Child. This can ruin the dish's look since it's supposed to become the top.

Workarounds can avoid the old-school technique's possible problems. Some people arrange the potato slice layers and spoon the butter in between them off the heat, then put the pan on the stove for browning. Another technique reverses the order, putting the pan with the potato slices in the oven first, then browning them on the stove at the end. Instead of using a cast-iron skillet like Ina Garten's iconic favorite, using an oven-safe non-stick skillet means you don't have to worry about the bottom layer sticking to the pan.

You can also add more flavor to traditional Pommes Anna, which was named after a celebrated courtesan in mid-19th-century Paris, where it was created at Café Anglais. Add ingredients like thinly-sliced or sauteed onions or shallots; chopped chives, rosemary, or thyme; or parmesan, Romano, or Gruyère cheese between the layers. Another option is to heat the clarified butter with garlic and/or herbs to infuse it with their flavor.