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Surprise Potatoes
5 large potatoes 1 lb. cold meat 3 mushrooms 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 1/2 tablespoonful chopped parsley Salt and pepper to season Peel and chop the mushrooms, and cook them in one tablespoonful of the butter. Cut the meat into small pieces, add it to the mushrooms, season nicely, and heat thoroughly. Choose five large, even-sized potatoes, wash and dry them; make a small incision in each, place in a hot oven, and bake until soft.
Cut each potato into half lengthways, scoop out most of the center, and rub through a sieve. Season with salt and pepper, add the remainder of the butter and the parsley; replace some of this mixture in the potato skin, leaving a hollow in each.
Fill this center cavity with the meat preparation.
Place the halves of potato together again, lay them in small fireproof dishes, and put in the oven to reheat.
A stuffed baked potato built to use up yesterday's roast. The method is sound; only the vagueness about heat and the assumption of a coal-range larder need translating.
- Oven temperature"A hot oven" for baking potatoes is somewhere around 400-450F; 425F works. Large potatoes will need 60 to 75 minutes to cook through, and the small incision the recipe calls for will let steam escape so the skins are less likely to split.
- The hinge: dry the fleshScoop and sieve the potato while it is still hot and let the steam go off before you add butter. Cold or wet mashed potato will not hold the hollow you need for the filling, and the two halves will slump apart in the oven.
- Butter measureTwo heaping tablespoonfuls at 2 oz is 4 tablespoons in modern terms, half a stick. One tablespoon goes to the mushrooms, the rest into the potato.
- The cold meatA pound of leftover roast beef, lamb, or chicken, chopped fine rather than cubed so it packs into the cavity. Because it is already cooked, it only needs heating through with the mushrooms, two or three minutes; longer and it dries out.
- MushroomsThree mushrooms in a recipe of this date will have been larger than a modern button mushroom, so three buttons is likely to be too little. About 4 oz of chestnut or portobello, chopped, and cooked until the liquid has gone, keeps the filling from being watery.
- Sieving, and the alternativeRubbing through a sieve gives a smooth, lump-free purée; a ricer does the same job faster. Do not use a food processor, which turns baked potato to glue.
- Reheating and holding togetherThe recipe gives no temperature or time for the reheating; a moderate oven, around 375F for 15 to 20 minutes, is enough. Tying each potato once with kitchen string will keep the halves closed, as will nesting it snugly in a small dish, which is what the original directs.
- YieldFive potatoes, one each, as a light supper or lunch dish. A green salad or plain buttered greens is all it needs.
- SeasoningCold roast meat is bland and starchy potato blander still. Season the meat mixture and the potato purée separately and taste both; the recipe's "season nicely" is doing a lot of work.
Cookery books of the early twentieth century commonly carry a chapter of cold meat recipes, because a household that roasted a large joint on Sunday faced the remains of it on Monday and Tuesday, and the thrift of using them up was, by many accounts, felt as something close to a duty. "Surprise" dishes were a small genre of their own: the surprise is that a plain baked potato, set on the plate looking whole, turns out to have a savoury filling hidden inside. The trick of concealing one food within another was a stock piece of Victorian and Edwardian kitchen theatre, seen also in surprise omelettes. The named fireproof dishes point to the period's enthusiasm for ovenproof earthenware and glass, which let a cook take a dish from oven to table and made individual servings practical in a way that a heavy iron pot never had.