Home › Vegetables › Potatoes in the Half Shell
Potatoes in the Half Shell
Bake six medium-sized potatoes; when they are soft cut a slice from the top of each and scoop out the potato.
Mash it, add two tablespoons of butter, salt, pepper, two tablespoons of hot milk and the whites of two eggs beaten stiff.
Put this mixture back into the skins, sprinkle with grated cheese and bake for five minutes in a very hot oven.
A twice-baked potato in its earliest recognizable form. Nothing here is unsafe or obsolete; the only real decisions are oven temperature and how much you fill the shells.
- Oven for the first bakeBake the potatoes at 400-425F for 45 to 60 minutes, until a skewer slides through without resistance. Russets or other high-starch baking potatoes give the dry, fluffy interior the mashing depends on.
- "A very hot oven"That means 450-475F for the second bake. Five minutes at that heat is enough to set the surface and brown the cheese; if your oven runs cooler, give it eight to ten minutes or finish under the broiler.
- Scoop with the shell in mindLeave about a quarter inch of potato attached to the skin. Scooped too clean, the shells collapse when you refill them.
- The egg whites are the pointTwo stiffly beaten whites folded into the hot mash are what distinguish this from a plain stuffed potato -- they make it puff and lighten in the second bake. Fold them in gently once the mash has stopped steaming hard, and get the filling into the oven promptly.
- Milk quantityTwo tablespoons of hot milk for six potatoes is a modest amount by current taste. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop when the mash is soft but still holds a shape; a wet filling will not puff.
- CheeseThe recipe says only 'grated cheese', which implies something dry enough to grate; a firm Cheddar-type cheese would suit, and Parmesan works and browns faster.
- YieldSix potatoes serve six as a side dish, or three as a supper with a salad.
Stuffed and re-baked potatoes of this kind appear in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, and the 'half shell' phrasing was by then a common way of presenting food served back in its own casing. The beaten egg whites belong to a wider period taste for lightened, souffle-style vegetable dishes. Good Housekeeping was founded in 1885, and a dish calling for butter, milk, eggs and cheese together assumes a household that could afford all four.