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Stuffed Potatoes
Mince some cold meat very fine and season to taste. Choose large potatoes of one size, peel and core them, taking care not to core them quite through. Fill them with the minced meat and bits of potatoes, and put them in a dish to bake with a cup -of water and a little dripping.
Bake one hour and baste often.
— Miss Maude Hill
A frugal way to use up Sunday's roast: the potato becomes both container and starch. The method works, but it needs a hotter oven and more fat than the terse original suggests.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this period, which left the oven to the cook's judgement. Bake at 375-400F; an hour at that heat cooks a large potato through and browns the outside.
- Coring the potatoesAn apple corer is the right tool. Leave a good half inch of potato at the closed end so the filling and juices stay inside, and reserve the plugs — the recipe expects you to chop them and pack them in with the meat.
- DrippingBeef dripping is the saved fat from a roast. Bacon fat, lard or butter all do the job; use two to three tablespoons, since a cup of water alone will steam rather than brown.
- The cooked meatThe filling is already-cooked meat, so seasoning is the whole point of it. Season assertively — salt, pepper, a little onion, mustard or thyme — because the potato is bland and will absorb whatever the meat gives up.
- Basting"Baste often" is not decoration here. The exposed potato skin dries and cracks in a dry oven; spoon the pan liquid over every 15 minutes, and add a splash of water if the dish threatens to go dry.
- CoveringLoosely covering for the first 40 minutes, then finishing uncovered, gives a more reliably tender potato than the open dish the original assumes.
- YieldFigure one large potato per person and roughly a quarter cup of minced meat each — about a cup and a half of leftover roast for four.
Stuffed potatoes belong to the long tradition of second-day cookery, in which the Sunday joint was expected to reappear on Monday and Tuesday in some altered form. Nineteenth-century American household books are full of these dishes — hash, croquettes, shepherd's pie, meat-filled vegetables — because refrigeration was limited and waste was a moral as well as an economic failing. The potato was the obvious vessel: cheap, storable through the winter in a cellar bin, and substantial enough to make a portion on its own. The recipe's attribution to a named woman is typical of community-compiled cookbooks of the period, which were often sold to raise money for a church or library and drew their contents from whatever the subscribers actually cooked. Note how little the instructions explain; they were written for readers who already knew what dripping was and what their own oven would do.