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Potato Puff
2 cups of mashed potatoes, 2 eggs, 3 tablespoonfuls of cream, 1 tablespoonful of butter, Salt and pepper to taste.
Put the potatoes in a saucepan, add the yolks, cream, and seasoning, stirring constantly over the fire until the potatoes are very light and hot. Take from the fire and stir in carefully the well-beaten whites of the eggs. the potatoes carefully in a greased baking dish, or into small gem pans. Bake in a quick oven until brown.
Put
A soufflé-style potato dish that depends entirely on how gently the beaten whites are handled. The text is garbled at the end — the stray "Put" belongs before "the potatoes carefully in a greased baking dish."
- The hingeFold the beaten whites in with a spatula and stop while streaks are still faintly visible. Stirring them in, as the original says, deflates the mixture and gives you a dense potato cake rather than a puff.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F. At that heat individual gem pans should brown in something like 15-20 minutes, a single shallow baking dish rather longer; the recipe gives no time and says only 'until brown.'
- Gem pansSmall cast-iron or tinned muffin pans, essentially a standard muffin tin. Grease them well and fill about three-quarters full; the mixture rises and then settles.
- CreamNineteenth-century cream was not standardised and varied a good deal, but was often lighter than modern heavy cream, nearer today's light cream or half-and-half. Either works; heavy cream gives a slightly richer, heavier puff.
- The potatoesFloury potatoes, russets or similar, mashed smooth before the yolks go in. Freshly mashed potato lightens most readily; cold leftover mash is stiffer and benefits from being warmed and loosened first.
- "Over the fire"Low to medium heat, stirring without pause. The aim is to warm the mixture and set the yolks slightly, not to cook them to scrambled egg; two or three minutes is enough.
- YieldAbout four servings, or roughly eight to ten gem-pan puffs. Serve straight from the oven — like any soufflé it falls within a few minutes.
Potato puff belongs to a family of "made-over" dishes designed to turn yesterday's boiled or mashed potatoes into something that could be sent to the table in its own right. The technique -- enriching a puree with yolks, then lightening it with beaten whites -- follows the pattern of the French souffle, which English-language cookbook writers adapted to humbler ingredients. Such a dish, looking elegant while costing almost nothing, had obvious appeal to the household cook.