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Potato Souffle
Bake six or eight large potatoes, and when they are done enough burst the skins, and scoop out the floury part with a spoon. Take a quarter of a pound of this flour and mix with it two table-spoonfuls of finely-sifted sugar, an ounce of butter, half a pint of boiling cream pleasantly flavoured with lemon-rind or cinnamon. Beat the mixture until it is quite smooth, then add the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, and, separately, the whites of six eggs whisked to a firm froth. Pour the souffle into a buttered souffle-tin, round the top of which has been secured a broad band of oiled paper to prevent the souffle overflowing its sides, and bake in a well-heated oven. Serve the souffle the moment it is taken from the oven. If a proper souffle-tin is not at hand, a deep pie-dish may be substituted for it. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A sweet soufflé built on baked potato rather than flour paste — the starch does the work a panada normally would. It behaves like any soufflé: everything must be ready before the whites go in, and the oven door stays shut.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whites are whisked to a firm froth and must be folded in last, in two or three additions, with the potato base still warm but not hot. Beating them in, as the earlier instruction to "beat until quite smooth" might suggest, will collapse the whole thing.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound of potato flesh is about 115 g, roughly a generous cup once riced. Half a pint of cream is 10 imperial fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; two tablespoons of "finely-sifted sugar" means caster or superfine sugar.
- "A well-heated oven"Read this as roughly 375–400°F (190–200°C), with the dish on a low shelf. A 6-cup soufflé dish will take about 25 to 35 minutes; it is done when risen, browned and only faintly wobbling at the centre.
- Flavouring the creamBring the cream to the boil with a strip of lemon rind or a piece of cinnamon stick, let it infuse off the heat for ten minutes, then strain it before use. Prolonged boiling with the aromatics left in can give a bitter edge, particularly if any white pith is attached to the rind.
- PotatoesUse floury bakers — russets or Maris Pipers — and pass the hot flesh through a ricer or a sieve rather than mashing. Any lump survives to the finished soufflé, and cooled potato turns gluey when worked.
- The paper bandA collar of parchment brushed with oil, tied round the dish and standing two inches above the rim, is still the correct method for a soufflé that will rise past its container. Butter the dish itself and dust it with sugar so the mixture can climb.
- Egg ratioSix whites to four yolks is deliberate — the extra whites lift a comparatively heavy potato base. Do not even out the numbers.
- Yield and timingFive or six as the original states, and served immediately: it will begin to sink within two or three minutes of leaving the oven. Have the table sitting before you open the door.
Cassell's places this among sweet soufflés, a category that arrived in British cookery books through French practice and had become a set piece of the late-Victorian dinner by the time this dictionary was compiled. The technique is generally traced to early nineteenth-century French kitchens, where a starch-thickened base bound with yolks and lightened with whipped whites was the standard formula; using baked potato in place of a flour panada is a thrifty domestic variation on the same principle. The "probable cost, 2s." is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced most dishes so that a household could budget a menu — and it shows where the money went here, not in the potatoes but in the half-pint of cream and the eggs. Sweet potato puddings and cakes were long established in British cooking well before this; the soufflé treatment simply gave an old economical ingredient a fashionable French shape.