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Stuffed Potatoes
Wash six medium-sized, smooth potatoes. Bake, and cut off a lengthwise slice from each; scoop out potato with a spoon using care that the shells are not broken. Pass through ricer, add two tablespoons butter, season with salt and pepper, one-half cup hot milk or cream. Add two egg yolks well beaten, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Refill shells with this mixture, using pastry bag and rose tube or pile it lightly with spoon (do not spread smoothly). Bake in a hot oven until potatoes are well puffed and browned.
A soufflé-style twice-baked potato from a 1913 American household book. The whipped whites are the whole point — everything else is standard mashed potato.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe beaten whites are the only leavening. Fold them into the riced potato while it is warm but not hot, in two additions, and stop as soon as they disappear. Stirring them in flat gives you an ordinary filled potato.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no temperature for the first bake; a modern equivalent is around 400F, baked until a skewer slides through. "A hot oven" for the second bake corresponds to roughly 425-450F in period usage, and the tops need only long enough to puff and brown.
- Medium potatoesUse russets or another dry, floury baking potato, 6–8 oz each. Waxy potatoes will not rice cleanly and the filling turns gluey.
- The ricerA ricer or food mill is genuinely better here than a masher, and a food processor is the one tool to avoid — it works the starch and makes paste.
- Milk quantityHalf a cup of hot milk for six potatoes is on the loose side once the eggs go in. Add it gradually and stop when the mixture is thick enough to hold a peak on the spoon.
- PipingA "rose tube" is a large star tip. The book says only not to spread the mixture smoothly; ridged peaks brown more readily, which is probably the point.
- Yield and servingSix filled shells (the recipe takes a lengthwise slice off each potato rather than halving it), enough for six as a side dish. They can be filled ahead and refrigerated, allowing extra time in the second bake, though they will puff a little less.
Twice-baked potatoes belong to the same late-Victorian and Edwardian enthusiasm for the souffl eé that produced cheese souffl eés, spinach souffl eés and potato souffl eés: separate the eggs, beat the whites stiff, fold, bake hot. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) set out the technique, and the pastry bag with a rose tube reflects the same period's taste for food that arrived at the table looking arranged. 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was organised as a year of complete Sunday menus, and a dish like this earns its place by being showy, cheap, and mostly doable in advance.