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Potato Patties
Take as many large, well-shaped potatoes as it is intended there should be patties, wash them well, and bake them. Take them out before they are quite done enough, so that the skin may not be injured, and carefully cut off the top, and scoop out the inside with a spoon. Mix with the floury part two or three spoonfuls of thick cream, a little piece of butter, and a pinch of salt, together with sugar, lemon or cinnamon flavouring, and the yolks and whites of two or three eggs beaten and added separately. Put this mixture into the hollow potatoes, place them upright side by side in a buttered dish, and bake them in a hot oven. If liked, savoury instead of sweet potato patties can be made by mixing with the potato flour a little pounded veal and ham, and cream, salt, pepper, lemon-peel, grated nutmeg, and mushroom ketchup added in suitable proportions. Time to bake, twelve to fifteen minutes.
A twice-baked potato with the skins used as cases, offered in both a sweet and a savoury version. The instructions assume the cook knows how to judge a potato by feel, so the timings need filling in.
- The hinge: underbake the first bakeThe potatoes must come out while the skins are still firm and slightly resistant, or they collapse as you scoop. Bake at 400F for 45-55 minutes for a large potato, until a skewer meets a little resistance at the centre, then let them sit five minutes before cutting the tops off.
- "Potato flour" here is not starchWhen the recipe says to mix with the potato flour, it means the dry floury flesh you have just scooped out, not the commercial potato starch sold under that name. Use a floury baking potato -- russet or King Edward -- since waxy varieties will not give the dry crumb the filling depends on.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe calls for a hot oven without giving a figure; a modern equivalent is usually taken as roughly 425-450F. Twelve to fifteen minutes at that heat should be enough to set the egg and colour the tops.
- Eggs added separatelyThe recipe says only that the yolks and whites are beaten and added separately; the usual reading is yolks beaten into the warm potato and the whites beaten and added last, which helps the filling rise above the rim rather than sit flat. Do not add the whites to a mixture hot enough to cook them.
- Pounded veal and hamFor the savoury version, the recipe does not say whether the meat is raw or cooked; use cooked meat reduced to a paste, since twelve to fifteen minutes in the oven will not cook raw veal through. A food processor does in seconds what a mortar did by hand. About 2 oz of meat to three or four potatoes is a sensible proportion.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, not the tomato condiment. It is still sold by British specialist grocers; a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or a dash of soy plus a little mushroom powder gives a comparable savoury lift.
- Quantities left openNo measures are given for sugar or flavourings. For four large potatoes, start with 2 teaspoons sugar and a pinch of cinnamon or the grated zest of half a lemon in the sweet version, and taste before the whites go in.
- Yield and servingOne patty per person. The sweet version is a light pudding or nursery dish rather than a side; the savoury one stands as a supper course with a salad. Both are best straight from the oven, as the beaten whites deflate on standing.
The word patty in nineteenth-century English kitchens meant a small filled case of almost any kind -- pastry, bread, or here the potato itself -- rather than the flattened cake of minced meat it usually means now. The recipe shows the Victorian habit of treating the potato skin as a serving vessel long before the twice-baked potato acquired that name. The sweet version, flavoured with sugar, cream, lemon and cinnamon and lightened with beaten egg white, belongs to an older tradition in which potatoes were as readily sweetened as they were salted; sweet potato puddings appear in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward.