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Souffle Potatoes
Select 6 large even-sized potatoes, wash and scrub them, and when dry bake them in hot oven until done. Cut off small portion of skin and remove inside part while hot. Rub them quickly through sieve into a basin, add 1 tablespoon cream, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste, and work in 4 yolks of eggs.
Beat whites of eggs to stiff froth, and stir lightly into mixture. Fill potato shells with this, and bake slowly for about 1/2 hour, or long enough for mixture to rise, and surface of it to brown. If liked, a little grated cheese can be incorporated with mixture and sprinkled over top of potatoes just before baking second time.
A twice-baked potato lightened with beaten egg whites, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The original assumes you know both oven temperatures it never states.
- The two oven settingsThe book states neither. By the conventions of the period a "hot oven" is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F, and large potatoes may want the better part of an hour; "bake slowly" points to the moderate-to-slow end, low enough to let the souffle mixture rise before the surface sets and browns.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, and the tablespoon of shortening is doing nothing here that butter will not do better. Butter also supplies flavour the neutral fat does not.
- Work quickly while hotThis is the hinge. The flesh must be riced or sieved while it is still steaming, so the starch cells stay separate and the puree stays fluffy. Cooled potato worked with a spoon turns gluey and no amount of egg white will lift it.
- Sieve, not masherA ricer or food mill gives the smooth lump-free base the recipe wants. Never use a food processor on potatoes; the blade ruptures the starch and the result is paste.
- Yolks and whitesFour yolks into six potatoes' worth of flesh is generous and correct for a souffle texture. Fold the whites in two additions with a spatula and stop while streaks are barely gone; overworking is what makes these sink.
- Filling the shellsCutting a lid off the top, as written, gives a narrow opening. Halving the potatoes lengthwise is easier to fill and gives more browned surface. Either way, mound the mixture above the rim so the rise shows.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little. A rasp or two over the bowl; nutmeg turns up often with potato and cream in cookery of this period, and pre-ground jarred nutmeg is flat by comparison.
- YieldSix potatoes, so six servings as a side dish, or three as a supper with the cheese variation and a salad. They must go to the table straight from the oven; they deflate within a few minutes.
This comes from a genre peculiar to the early twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, reached American kitchens in 1911, and the recipe collections that followed it worked the name into dishes where lard, butter or drippings had always served. The dish itself is older than the shortening. Stuffed and re-baked potatoes lightened with egg appear in French and English cookery through the nineteenth century, a domestic cousin of the true souffle that needed no ramekin or timing panic, since the potato skin supplied both the mould and the serving dish.