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Potatoes, Stuffed
Hollow out some large potatoes. Prepare a paste composed of mealy potatoes beaten in a mortar with chopped parsley, chives and shallot, butter, fat bacon cut into dice, pepper and salt. Butter the insides of the potatoes, and nearly fill them with the above paste; put them on a buttered tin, and bake in a Dutch oven. When browned, serve.
A late-Victorian stuffed baked potato, written in the telegraphic style Cassell's used throughout its shorter entries. The gaps are mostly quantities and equipment, and both are easy to close.
- The Dutch oven is not a potIn British books of this period a Dutch oven is a hooded tin reflector set on the hearth with its open side to the fire, which roasts and browns by radiant heat. A hot conventional oven (around 400F) will brown the potatoes in much the same way, without a reflector and without turning them.
- Work in two stagesThe paste has to be made from cooked potato, since 'mealy potatoes beaten in a mortar' cannot be raw. The recipe does not say whether the shells themselves start raw or already cooked; the simplest reading for a modern kitchen is to bake large floury potatoes at 400F for about an hour, halve or cap them, and scoop the flesh, leaving a shell about a quarter-inch thick.
- Mealy means flouryMaris Piper, King Edward, russet or another high-starch variety. A waxy salad potato will give a gluey paste that never lightens in the oven.
- The mortarPounding in a mortar was one of the usual ways of smoothing potato before ricers were common, alongside mashing and passing through a sieve. A ricer or food mill gives a better texture in seconds; a food processor is the one tool to avoid, as the blades turn potato starch to paste.
- Quantities to work fromFor six large potatoes: roughly 2 oz butter, 4 oz fat bacon or pancetta diced small, a heaped tablespoon each of chopped parsley and chives, and one small shallot, finely minced. Salt and pepper to taste.
- Fat baconCassell's means fat belly or streaky, close to what is sold now as pancetta or salt pork; the recipe does not specify smoked or green. Dice it and render it in a pan until the fat runs and the dice are lightly coloured before it goes into the paste, or it may still be underdone when the potatoes have browned.
- Raw shallot and chivesSweat the minced shallot in the bacon fat for a minute. Raw shallot in a short bake stays sharp; the chives, by contrast, should go in off the heat so they keep their colour.
- FinishingFill the shells generously, dot with butter, and return to a 400F oven for 15 to 20 minutes until browned on top. Six potatoes serve six as a side dish or three as a light supper.
A dressier baked-and-stuffed potato rather than a plain boiled or mashed one. The seasoning — parsley, chives, shallot and a little fat bacon bound in butter — is a French-style herb mixture applied to an English hearth vegetable, and hollowing a baked potato and returning the enriched flesh to its skin was a familiar way of dressing up a cheap root. The Dutch oven named in the last line is a reminder that much late-Victorian domestic cooking still happened in front of the fire rather than inside a closed range: a tin hood that caught and threw back the heat, cheap enough for households with no proper oven at all.