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Potato Souffle
Into 1 pint of hot, smoothly mashed potato, stir 1 tablespoonful of butter, salt, pepper, and 2 level teaspoonfuls of minced parsley. Add 2/3 of a cupful of hot milk, or sufficient to make the potato very moist. Add the beaten yolks of 4 eggs, beating them in thoroughly; then add the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs, folding them in quickly. Turn at once into a buttered souffle-pan or deep baking-dish, and bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a moderately hot oven. Serve at once.
A straightforward egg-lightened mashed potato. The whole dish hinges on getting it into the oven the moment the whites are folded in.
- Oven"Moderately hot" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 375-400F. The recipe's own 15-20 minutes is the only guide to timing; it does not say what size dish to use, beyond "souffle-pan or deep baking-dish."
- Quantity of potatoA pint means a pint by volume of finished mashed potato, roughly 2 cups, which is about 1 1/4 lb of raw potatoes. Use a dry, floury variety such as russet.
- Keep everything hotThe potato, butter and milk should all still be hot when the yolks go in. Cold mash tightens and the whites will not lift it.
- Fold, then bake immediatelyOnce the whites are in, the batter begins losing air. Have the dish buttered and the oven at temperature before you start beating.
- Consistency"Very moist" is the useful instruction: aim for a mixture that just slumps from the spoon before the whites go in. Too stiff and it bakes dense; the 2/3 cup of milk is a starting point, not a fixed amount.
- The dishA souffle-pan here is simply a straight-sided deep baking dish. Butter it well and do not fill past three-quarters.
- Yield and servingEnough for about four as a side, judging by the quantities. It sinks soon after leaving the oven, which is why the recipe says to serve at once.
Potato souffles of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century American cooking-school tradition, which took French technique and applied it to homely material: separate the eggs, beat the whites, and a bowl of mashed potato becomes a course worth carrying to the table. Books of this period are full of such transformations. The parsley and the instruction to serve at once are both period markers -- green flecks for appearance, and a frank admission that the dish will not wait.