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Potato Puff
2 cups mashed potatoes 2 tablespoons melted butter 2 eggs 1/2 cup scalded milk 1/2 teaspoon salt Stir the melted butter into the potato, beat to a white cream; add eggs beaten very light and then the milk and seasonings. Bake in a deep buttered dish, in a quick oven, for twenty minutes, or until nicely browned. Souffle: Use 4 eggs, beat yolks and whites separately until stiff; use seasonings and butter as given above. Fold in the yolks and lastly the whites, and cook as souffle.
Potato Croquettes. 1 rule for mashed potatoes 1 egg 1/4 teaspoon onion juice Beat the mashed potato until very light, add the beaten egg and onion juice, form while hot into rolls; crumb, egg and crumb again, and fry in deep fat till a golden brown. Serve on folded napkin and garnish with parsley or serve with White Sauce No. 1.
Sugar Potatoes or Candied Yams 6 sweet potatoes 1 cup white sugar 1/4 cup water 1 teaspoon butter Parboil, peel and cut the potatoes in quarter inch slices. Cook the other ingredients to form a syrup. Place the slices of potato in the syrup and simmer gently for an hour, then let the syrup boil away until it is almost dry. Serve with meats.
Four related dishes on one page: a baked potato puff, a soufflé variation, croquettes, and candied sweet potatoes. The puff and soufflé stand or fall on how much air you beat into the potato.
- Quick ovenIn cookbooks of this period a "quick oven" is usually taken as roughly 400–425°F. Twenty minutes at that heat browns the top before the interior sets too firmly; a cooler oven gives a dense, flat puff.
- Start with dry potatoUse baking potatoes, riced or passed through a food mill rather than whipped in a processor, which turns them gluey. Wet or waxy potato will not "beat to a white cream" and the puff will sink.
- Scalded milkScalding was standard practice with raw milk, usually explained as a way of dealing with enzymes and off-flavors. With pasteurized milk the practical point is simply that the milk should be hot going into hot potato, so the mixture stays warm and light.
- "1 rule for mashed potatoes"An older cookbook usage: "rule" means recipe, so this calls for one recipe's worth of mashed potatoes (the book's own mashed-potato rule; about 2 cups on the scale used above). It is not a unit of measure.
- Onion juiceGrate a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate on a microplane and use the liquid. Chopped onion would show as raw specks in a croquette that fries for only a few minutes.
- Croquette fryingDeep fat at 365–375°F, and chill the crumbed rolls at least 30 minutes before frying even though the recipe says to form them hot. Cold croquettes hold their shape; warm ones split and leak into the oil.
- Candied yams timingAn hour of simmering suits parboiled slices that hold their shape. Moist-fleshed modern sweet potatoes may collapse well before that; check at 20–25 minutes and reduce the syrup separately if needed.
- YieldRoughly four as a side dish for the puff or soufflé, in something around a 1 1/2-quart baking dish; the croquette mixture will make perhaps eight; the six sweet potatoes serve about six.
- Folded napkinCroquettes were served on a cloth-lined platter to absorb frying fat. A rack over paper does the job and keeps the crust crisp.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was promotional literature from Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills, and it surrounded its flour recipes with a full domestic-science curriculum — hence a vegetable chapter organized as a set of variations on one technique. The progression from mashed potato to puff to soufflé to croquette is the cooking-school tradition of Fannie Farmer and Maria Parloa, which taught dishes as families rather than as isolated recipes. "Sugar potatoes or candied yams" reflects the loose American habit, then as now, of calling sweet potatoes yams; true yams are a separate tropical genus.