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POTATOES, FORCED (a French recipe)
Take two large kidney potatoes, wash and peel them, cut them in half lengthwise; scoop out the inside carefully with a spoon, leaving the outer part about the thickness of a penny-piece. Take two large roasted potatoes, two shallots chopped fine, a piece of butter the size of an egg, a little piece of fat bacon; a pinch of parsley and chives chopped fine; pound all with pepper and salt, form into a paste, butter the insides of the potato-shells, and fill them with this paste, in which let the upper part be convex; butter a baking-tin with fresh butter, put you potatoes on it, and bake them in a moderate oven; in half an hour, if the upper and under parts are browned, serve.
A straightforward stuffed potato, but the original assumes a few things a modern cook should not: that raw potato shells will cook through in half an hour, and that you know what a kidney potato is.
- Kidney potatoesAn elongated, waxy variety of the fingerling type — Kipfler, Ratte and Anya are the closest things on sale now. They hold their shape when scooped and baked; a floury baking potato will slump.
- The thickness of a penny-pieceThe Victorian penny was a heavy coin, a couple of millimetres at most; leave a shell of a few millimetres. Thinner and it tears when you fill it.
- Par-cook the shellsRaw scooped shells may not be fully tender in thirty minutes at moderate heat while the filling browns, particularly if you leave them thicker than the recipe intends. Simmering or steaming the hollowed halves until barely yielding before filling is the safer route.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F / 175C. At roughly that heat half an hour should be enough to brown top and base once the shells have been softened.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons — a generous amount for four halves, and it is what carries the shallot and bacon through the mash.
- Fat baconCured pork back fat or a piece of unsmoked streaky. Pounding it in raw is authentic, but rendering it briefly with the shallots gives a cleaner flavour and guarantees it is cooked through in a dense filling.
- Pound allA mortar was the original tool. A ricer for the roasted potato flesh plus hand-mixing gives the right texture; a food processor turns cooked potato gluey in seconds.
- YieldFour filled halves — a side dish for two, or a first course for four.
"Forced" here has nothing to do with force: it is the English rendering of the French farci, stuffed, the same root that gives us forcemeat, and it persisted in English cookery books alongside "stuffed." Pommes de terre farcies were standard bourgeois French cooking, a way of making two or three potatoes and a scrap of bacon into a dish worth putting on a table, and the recipe was flagged as French partly as a mark of quality — late nineteenth-century English cookery books traded heavily on French authority. The shallot-parsley-chives combination and the pounding of everything to a paste in a mortar are both entirely of that tradition, as is the instruction to leave the top convex so it domes and browns rather than sinking.