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Souffle, Potato
This dish has the double advantage of being excellent and economical. Take as many large potatoes as you expect guests for dinner. As the potatoes are to look well when cut, wash them well, and select the best shaped; put them into the oven, and when done, cut them in half, so that the halves will stand, scoop out the insides with a spoon, and put it in a stewpan with two or three spoonfuls of double cream, a small bit of butter, a little salt, some sugar, a little lemon-peel rasped on sugar, three yolks of eggs, adding off the fire four frothed whites. Put this mixture into the hollow potatoes, placing them in rather a hot oven. The taste may sometimes be varied with lemon, orange-flower water, etc. This is a pretty dish. Apple souffl may be prepared in the same way, excepting that the apples must not be baked previously to being filled with the ingredients, but merely cored and the interior scooped out, as above directed.
A sweet potato soufflé baked and served in the potato skins, from an era when the potato was as likely to appear as a dessert as a side dish. The quantities are given for the potato mixture only, so scale by taste rather than by count.
- The hinge: keep the whites separate to the endThe yolks, cream, butter and flavourings go into the warm potato in the pan; the frothed whites are folded in only after the pan is off the heat. Beaten to soft peaks and folded with a light hand, they are all the lift this dish has.
- "Rather a hot oven"Probably somewhere in the region of 400-425F. The shells are already cooked and the filling only needs to set and rise. The book gives no times or temperatures anywhere, for the first baking or the second, so go by the look of the potatoes and of the risen filling rather than by a clock.
- Double creamBritish double cream is about 48% butterfat. American heavy or whipping cream is the nearest substitute. Note that the recipe fixes the cream and the eggs but leaves the number of potatoes to the number of guests, so two or three spoonfuls is a starting point to be scaled by eye.
- Sugar and salt are unmeasuredThe original assumes a cook tasting as she goes. Start with about a tablespoon of sugar and a good pinch of salt per three potatoes, and adjust before the whites go in — once folded, you cannot stir.
- Lemon-peel rasped on sugarRub a sugar lump or loose sugar hard against the zest of a lemon until the sugar is yellow and fragrant. This is an oil extraction, not a grating, and it gives a cleaner perfume than zest alone.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still potent. A quarter teaspoon for the whole mixture is plenty; more turns the dish soapy.
- Choosing and hollowing the shellsFloury potatoes — russets or Maris Pipers — give the driest, lightest flesh. Leave about a quarter-inch of potato inside the skin so the halves keep their shape, and trim a sliver from the rounded side if they will not sit level.
- The apple version needs longerThe apple version -- the apples go in raw, merely cored and scooped, so the fruit has to cook through in the same bake as the filling and will need longer than the pre-baked potatoes. The book gives no separate oven or timing, saying only that it is done 'in the same way'. Use a firm baking apple that holds its walls.
- Yield and servingOne large potato, cut in half, serves one as the book intends. Serve straight from the oven; like any soufflé, it sinks within a few minutes.
The dish is plainly a sweet one, which surprises modern readers but would not have surprised a Victorian one — sugared potato puddings and potato cheesecakes are securely eighteenth-century commonplaces in English cookery books, from a time when the potato was still novel enough to be treated as a curiosity. The soufflé technique itself is French and had become fashionable in English kitchens through the nineteenth century, and the phrasing here — "take as many large potatoes as you expect guests" — is a long way from the measured, standardised style that would take over by the 1900s. Practically, the lemon-peel-on-sugar trick and the orange-flower water both belong to an older confectioner's vocabulary that vanilla would largely displace in the following century.