Home › Vegetables › Surprise Potatoes
Surprise Potatoes
Select large smooth potatoes and bake them in a very hot oven. When tender cut off the end of each and with a spoon scoop out into a heated bowl, taking care not to break the skins. Put through a ricer or mash until smooth, and for every 3 potatoes add i large teaspoonful of butter, 1 tablespoonful of cream and salt and pepper to taste. When well beaten stir in lightly the stiffly whipped white of 1 egg and refill the skins. Put on the covers and place in a brisk oven long enough to make very hot.
A twice-baked potato in which the shell is opened at the end rather than split lengthwise, so the reassembled potato looks untouched. The whipped egg white is the whole point of the trick and the whole risk.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe says only "very hot" for the first bake and "brisk" for the second, without figures; period usage puts "very hot" at roughly 450F or above and "brisk" a little below that. Large potatoes will want something like 45-60 minutes for the first bake, and the second only long enough to heat through, as written.
- Fold, do not beatThe egg white goes in after the potato is seasoned and beaten smooth, and it goes in lightly, as the recipe says. Work it in too vigorously and the lift is lost.
- Work while hotScoop into a heated bowl, as written, and rice the flesh immediately; cooled potato is harder to rice and beats up less smoothly.
- The lidCutting off one end and keeping it as a cover means the cut has to be clean and shallow. Save each cap with its own potato so the caps sit flush.
- QuantitiesPer three potatoes: 1 large teaspoonful butter (period spoon measures were loose, and a heaped "large teaspoonful" may run to rather more than a modern level teaspoon), 1 tablespoon cream. The recipe gives the white of one egg without making clear whether that is per three potatoes or per batch.
- SkinsLeave a thin layer of flesh against the skin when scooping so the shells hold their shape. Any shell that tears is best filled and served as a plain stuffed half.
- YieldThree large potatoes serve three as a side dish.
Twice-baked potatoes appear all through late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American cookery, usually under names like "stuffed" or "potatoes in the half shell"; the "surprise" version, cut at the end and capped so the potato looks whole on the plate, belongs to a family of dishes that got their appeal from concealment rather than from any new ingredient. A potato, a spoonful of butter, a spoonful of cream and one egg white produce something that reads as a made dish and can carry a plain meal. The whipped-white lightening is the same logic that gives potato soufflé its lift at the smallest possible outlay, and the ricer — a standard piece of kitchen equipment by this period — is what gives the filling its smoothness.