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Potatoes Sefton
1 tablespoonful Crisco 3 baked potatoes Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 1 yolk of egg 1 tablespoonful cream Chopped parsley Watercress Split potatoes in halves lengthways. Scoop out centers, rub them through a sieve, add seasonings, melted Crisco, yolk of egg, and cream. Beat well till light, then put mixture into forcing bag with tube, force into potato cases which should be dried. Heat in moderate oven. Sprinkle a little chopped parsley on top and serve decorated with watercress.
Sufficient for three potatoes.
A twice-baked stuffed potato from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, piped rather than spooned back into its skin. The whole thing hinges on getting the shells dry before they are filled.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, so shortening appears where an older cook would have used butter. A tablespoon of butter gives better flavour here and behaves the same way.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). The potatoes are already cooked, so you are only setting the piped surface and heating through — 15 to 20 minutes, longer if you want colour.
- Forcing bag with tubeA piping bag; the recipe does not say which tube, though a star tube is the usual choice for this sort of piped potato. Chill the mixture slightly if it slumps, and do not overfill the bag or the warm puree softens in your hands.
- Dry the casesThis is the instruction that matters. Return the scooped-out halves to the oven for five to ten minutes before filling, or the piped potato sits on a damp skin and the whole thing collapses when you lift it.
- Rub through a sieveA ricer or food mill does the same job faster. Do not use a food processor — the starch turns the flesh gluey.
- Red pepperCayenne, used sparingly alongside the black pepper; American cookbooks of this period commonly list the two separately, as here.
- Beat well till lightDo this while the potato is still hot; a hot puree beats lighter and pipes more cleanly than a cold, stiffened one.
- YieldThe filling quantity is given as sufficient for three potatoes, which split lengthways makes six halves.
Dishes labelled Sefton in Victorian and Edwardian cookery — a Sefton pudding, for instance — are generally traced to the Earls of Sefton, whose kitchens, like those of other titled households, lent their names to preparations that then circulated far beyond them. By the time this potato reached an American promotional cookbook the association was purely decorative: an English-sounding name attached to a piped, stuffed potato of the kind French service called pommes duchesse. What is genuinely of its moment is the shortening. A Calendar of Dinners was written to demonstrate that a vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard across an entire year of menus, and the sprig of watercress and dusting of parsley reflect a period taste for garnishing even the humblest vegetable into something fit to send to the table.