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Baked Potatoes
Bake good-sized potatoes, remove from the oven, cut off the top and scoop out the potato, being careful not to break the cases. Mash fine and add a generous piece of butter, a little minced onion, pepper and salt. Put in the cases and return to the oven and bake until brown. Very fine.
— Mrs. William Joesbury
A stuffed twice-baked potato, given in the compressed shorthand of a community cookbook. The only real technique here is keeping the shells intact.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. In a modern oven, a large russet takes roughly 50-60 minutes at 400F, until a skewer goes through with no resistance. The second bake is simply "until brown," which at the same heat is usually a matter of 15-20 minutes.
- Keeping the cases wholeThis is the hinge of the recipe. Let the potatoes cool five to ten minutes before scooping, and leave a quarter-inch of flesh against the skin. Scooped boiling hot and scraped too thin, the shells tear and collapse in the second bake.
- "Good-sized potatoes"The recipe says nothing about variety, but a dry, floury potato works best here: russet or Idaho. Waxy red or new potatoes mash gluey and will not fluff.
- "A generous piece of butter"Reckon about a tablespoon per potato. The mash will be stiff; a spoonful of milk or cream per potato loosens it without turning it wet.
- The minced onionRaw onion in a filling that gets only a short second bake stays sharp. Mince it very fine, or soften it in the butter first.
- BrowningMound the filling above the rim and rough the surface with a fork so the peaks catch color. A few minutes under the broiler at the end does the same work faster.
- YieldOne potato per person as a side dish; two halves each if you split them lengthwise instead of cutting off the top.
Stuffed and returned-to-the-oven potatoes appear all through late nineteenth and early twentieth century American household cookery, often under names like "potatoes on the half shell" or simply "baked potatoes, stuffed"; the label "twice-baked" is a later usage. In the era of the coal or wood range, an oven was often already hot for a long stretch, so a second short bake cost little. Note also that the potato is cut across the top rather than split lengthwise, giving a standing case that holds a mound of filling. A recipe carried under a contributor's name is typical of the church and society compilations of the period, where much of the book's value lay in a neighbour's version of a plain dish being known to be good.