Home › Recipes › Preparing Potatoes with Snowdrift
Preparing Potatoes with Snowdrift
Snowdrift may be substituted for butter in mashed white, or sweet potatoes, if a little extra salt is added. Creamed potatoes are delicious in Cream or White Sauce No. 2-the amount of sauce being sufficient for two and a half cupfuls of diced, cooked potatoes. A little onion juice may be added, if desired.
Left-over, cold potatoes may be sauted a delightful brown in Snowdrift, and plain escalloped potatoes may be made more substantial by the addition of a cupful of American cheese, a cupful of minced ham, or a cupful of canned clams, to three cupfuls of diced, cooked potatoes and a cupful and a half of Cream or White Sauce No. 2.
The rich brown surface, so desired in the making of hashed brown potatoes, may always be obtained if Snowdrift is used.
This is less a single recipe than a set of proportions for using shortening in place of butter with cooked potatoes. The numbers are the useful part, and one or two of the ingredient names no longer mean what they did.
- What Snowdrift wasA cottonseed-oil shortening, comparable in use to modern vegetable shortening. Any solid all-vegetable shortening behaves the same way here: it stands in for butter and browns without scorching.
- The extra salt is not optionalButter of the period was salted, shortening is not, so mashed potatoes made with shortening taste flat without compensation. Figure about 1/4 teaspoon of salt per pound of potatoes beyond what you already used in the cooking water, then taste.
- Cream or White Sauce No. 2In books of this type, No. 2 is the medium sauce: 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Making 1 1/2 cups means one and a half times that, and it should be finished and seasoned before the potatoes go in.
- American cheeseAt the time this meant a plain firm factory cheddar, not the processed slices the name now brings to mind. Use a medium or sharp cheddar and grate it; a cupful grated is roughly 4 ounces.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A teaspoon is plenty for this quantity of sauce.
- Baking the escalloped dishThe original gives no oven directions. Layering the diced potatoes and additions with the sauce in a greased dish and baking in a moderate oven -- about 350F -- for 30 to 40 minutes, until it bubbles at the edges and the top has colored, is a modern approximation. Everything in it is already cooked, so you are only heating through and browning.
- Canned clamsDrain them well and add the liquor to the sauce rather than the dish, or the finished potatoes will be watery. Chopped clams go in at the end, since they toughen with long heat.
- Browning the sauted and hashed brown potatoesShortening contains no water or milk solids, which is genuinely why it browns more evenly than butter and does not blacken. Get the pan hot, spread the potatoes in a single layer, and leave them alone for several minutes before turning; stirring is what prevents a crust.
- YieldThe escalloped version, at three cups of potatoes plus a cup of meat, cheese or clams, serves four to six as a side or four as a supper dish.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this book is advertising literature: a cook book issued to teach housekeepers that the new solid vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard across the whole repertoire. Cottonseed oil had been an industrial byproduct of the Southern cotton crop, and the hardening of liquid oils into shelf-stable white shortening, which reached American kitchens from about 1911, gradually turned it into a kitchen staple. That commercial motive explains the shape of the page: rather than one dish it runs through every ordinary way a household cooked potatoes -- mashed, creamed, sauted, escalloped, hashed brown -- and inserts the product into each, with the honest concession that you will need to add salt. It also catches American cooking at a moment when "American cheese" still meant ordinary domestic cheddar.