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SOUFFLE, POTATO (au Citron)
Bake a dozen potatoes in the oven; when they are well done, open them, scoop out the most floury part, and mix it with half a pint of cream that has boiled and in which you have infused the peel of a lemon; to this add a little sugar, a large piece of butter, and a little salt--the taste of the sugar, however, must predominate; yet observe that the less sugar you use the lighter the souffl will be. Now break six eggs, throw the yolks of four only into the potatoes, beat the six whites, which pour gently with the above preparation into a dish-dish, add to it an ounce of fresh butter, and put it into the oven, which must not be too hot. When the dish is done enough, powder a little sugar over it, and use the salamander. Souffls must be served up the moment they are ready, for they are liable to sink.
A baked-potato soufflé sweetened with lemon-infused cream — closer to a dessert than a side. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a soufflé behaves, so the useful work is in the quantities and the equipment.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whites carry the whole dish. Beat them to soft, glossy peaks and fold them into the potato base in two or three additions, stopping while streaks are still visible. The base should be warm, not hot, or the whites will collapse on contact.
- A dozen potatoes is not what you needOnly "the most floury part" is used, and much of a baked potato is skin and denser flesh, so a dozen yields far less pulp than it sounds. Four or five large floury potatoes, baked until dry and passed through a ricer, should give about as much light pulp as this quantity of cream and eggs can support — though the original's dozen implies a drier, more potato-heavy mixture than a modern soufflé. Waxy potatoes will make it heavy.
- Half a pint of creamAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, a scant 1¼ US cups. Heavy cream is correct. Infuse the pared zest — no white pith — in the hot cream off the heat for ten to fifteen minutes, then strain.
- "An oven which must not be too hot"The book gives no temperature; a moderate oven, in the region of 350°F, is a reasonable modern reading. Higher and the outside sets before the centre rises; the recipe's own warning about sinking is the reason for the restraint.
- "Dish-dish"Apparently a printer's slip; read it as a deep buttered baking dish. The ounce of fresh butter is most likely for the dish rather than the mixture, though the wording is ambiguous. Butter it well and dust with sugar rather than flour, which helps the soufflé climb.
- The salamanderA long-handled iron plate heated red-hot and held over the surface to glaze the sugar. A broiler set high, or a kitchen blowtorch, does the same job in seconds — watch it constantly, as the sugar goes from amber to burnt very quickly.
- Sugar and lightnessThe remark that less sugar makes a lighter soufflé is broadly sound: sugar slows the set of beaten whites and weighs the mixture down. But the recipe also asks the taste of the sugar to predominate, so its two instructions pull against each other; sweeten to taste and dust at the end.
- Timing and yieldThe original gives none. In a deep dish of about 6 cups, expect roughly 30 to 40 minutes in a moderate oven, until well risen and only just tremulous at the centre; yield depends on how much potato pulp you use. The closing instruction is not decorative — carry it to the table straight from the oven.
Sweetened potato puddings were common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and French cookery, and in the eighteenth century in particular, when the potato was still being argued into respectability at the table, cooks demonstrated its range by pushing it into the dessert course alongside rice and semolina. The technique here is squarely French: baked floury potato stands in for the flour-and-milk panada of a classic soufflé, giving body without gluten, while lemon peel infused in scalded cream supplies nearly all the flavour. Cassell's *New Dictionary of Cookery* was an omnibus compiled in the later Victorian decades from a wide range of earlier sources, and this entry has a direct, second-person voice, with its aside about sugar and lightness and its injunction against a hot oven. The salamander it calls for was familiar kitchen equipment in the period, long before the domestic gas broiler made it redundant.