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Potato Puff
Soak old potatoes for several hours and boil in salted water. To two cups of potato mashed or put through a ricer add two tablespoons of butter, one teaspoon of salt and a little white pepper; fold in the whites of two eggs whipped stiff. Bake in a buttered dish.-Anne Warner.
A plain mashed-potato souffle with no oven temperature and no time given, which is where most of the guesswork lies.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives neither, so this is a reconstruction: a moderate oven, in the region of 375F, for roughly 25 to 35 minutes, until puffed and browned on top. The book's silence is typical of the period, when a cook judged the oven by hand and by eye.
- "Old potatoes"This means storage potatoes late in the season, not new ones. Their lower moisture gives a drier mash that holds air; a floury russet is the modern equivalent. Soaking old potatoes in cold water before boiling was a common period instruction, usually explained as freshening shrivelled tubers, though the recipe itself gives no reason.
- The hinge is the egg whiteWhip the whites to soft-firm peaks and fold them into potato that has cooled to warm, not hot. Hot potato deflates the foam on contact and you get a dense cake instead of a puff.
- Ricer versus masherThe ricer is the better choice here. Overworking potato in a bowl or a food processor develops the starch into glue, which will not rise no matter how well the whites are beaten.
- Dry the potatoDrain the boiled potatoes and return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute before ricing. Excess water is the other common cause of a flat result.
- Baking dishButter generously and do not fill more than about three-quarters full. A shallow one-quart dish gives more browned surface; a deeper one rises higher but takes longer.
- YieldTwo cups of mashed potato serves three or four as a side dish. Serve straight from the oven, as it sinks within a few minutes like any souffle.
- SeasoningWhite pepper kept the dish visually pale, a common convention of the era. Black pepper will do if you do not mind the flecks, though its flavour is not identical to white.
Potato "puffs" and "souffles" filled the vegetable chapters of nineteenth-century American cookbooks, where beaten egg white was often used to lift an otherwise humble mash into something fit for a company table. The instruction to soak old potatoes points to a kitchen still bound by the storage year: by late winter, cellar potatoes had lost water and gained sugar, and soaking was the usual remedy before boiling.