Select fine smooth potatoes; cut off the end of each and scrape out the inside. Mix this with chopped ham, onion and parsley, and a tablespoonful of butter. Season with salt, pepper and lemon-juice. Fill the potato with the mixture and let bake in a moderate oven until tender and serve hot.
March 4 — No. 4
Dutch
A terse turn-of-the-century formula that assumes the cook already knows how stuffed potatoes work. The gaps worth filling are the state of the scooped-out potato, the oven, and the quantities, none of which the original gives.
- Bake first, then scoopTaken literally the recipe has you scrape out raw potato and mix it with ham and butter, which gives a dense, gluey filling that cooks unevenly. Bake the potatoes whole at 350F for about an hour first, then cut off the end, scoop, mash the flesh with the other ingredients and return them to the oven for 15-20 minutes to heat through and brown.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F in modern terms. Followed as written, with raw filling, the potatoes are likely to need an hour or more at that heat before a skewer passes through cleanly; the recipe itself says only 'until tender'.
- ProportionsNone are stated. For four large baking potatoes, roughly 4 oz chopped cooked ham, half a small onion, 2 tablespoons parsley and the tablespoon of butter the recipe specifies gives a filling that still tastes of potato rather than ham.
- The onionRaw chopped onion will not soften in the short time the shells spend in the oven, and stays sharp. Sweat it in the butter for a few minutes first, then fold butter and onion together into the potato.
- Lemon-juiceAbout a teaspoon for four potatoes. The recipe gives no quantity or reason; the likely intent is to cut the fat of the ham and butter rather than to read as lemon, and much more than that will make the filling sour.
- The cut endKeep the trimmed end and set it back on top like a lid before baking, or leave the opening exposed if you want a browned surface. Sitting the potatoes upright in a muffin tin or on crumpled foil keeps them from tipping.
- YieldOne potato per person as a light supper dish, half a potato alongside a roast.
Stuffed and re-baked potatoes turn up across nineteenth-century European cookery, and the "Dutch" label in a book like this one is a loose geographic tag rather than a citation of any Netherlands source. Day-book collections of this kind — being pinned to a nation, one dish for every date of the year, are usually associated with a moment when home cooks were being sold the idea of variety as an end in itself, though the page itself establishes neither date nor nationality; the national tag looks, on this evidence, to have been assigned on fairly slender grounds. Here the claim rests on ham, onion and parsley, a combination as at home in a Dutch kitchen as in a German or Belgian one. What the recipe does record accurately is the period habit of stretching a small quantity of cured meat across a bulk vegetable, a thrift that shaped a great deal of everyday cooking on both sides of the Atlantic.