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Italian Potatoes
Mix two cups hot mashed potatoes, one teaspoon onion juice, one tablespoon finely chopped parsley, one egg yolk well beaten, four stiffly beaten whites, one half cup grated cheese, and salt and pepper to taste. Pile lightly in baking dish and bake until brown.
A potato souffl")u2014 in all but name, and the recipe assumes you know how to treat one. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no yield.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirFour stiffly beaten whites are the only lift this dish has. Loosen the hot potato with the yolk and cheese first, then cut the whites in with a spatula in two or three additions. Beat them in and you have heavy cheese potatoes.
- Let the potato cool a little"Hot mashed potatoes" means freshly made, but potato straight off the heat will set the whites on contact and deflate them. Warm, not steaming, is what you want.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits it: roughly twenty-five to thirty-five minutes in a buttered dish, until puffed and browned on top.
- Onion juiceAn early-1900s standby: a halved onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth, giving flavour without visible pieces. A teaspoon of grated onion, or a small clove of grated garlic, does the same job.
- The cheeseHalf a cup grated, unspecified; a dry aged cheese such as Parmesan is the likely intention given the title, though the book does not say. A soft or high-moisture cheese will weep and weigh the mixture down.
- Pile lightlyHeap it into the dish rather than smoothing it flat. The rough surface is what browns, and packing it down compresses the air you just beat in.
- Yield and timingNo yield is given; two cups of potato with the whites folded in will serve about four as a side. Like any souffle it sinks as it cools, so it goes from oven to table.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer ": one American food firs issued to put their product in home kitchens, padded out with a full general cookery course so the book earned its shelf space. In that context a vegetable chapter entry like this one is filler in the best sense: competent, cheap, and drawn from the French repertoire that American cooking schools had absorbed by the turn of the century. The name looks like a period convention rather than a claim of origin; in English-language cookbooks of this era "Italian" attached to a dish often meant grated hard cheese, tomato, or macaroni, and here it appears to mean the half cup of cheese and nothing more. The technique is a potato souffle in all but name, beaten whites being a standard way to lighten a starchy base.