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Potato Puff
Prepare two cups hot mashed potato. Add one half cup milk, two well-beaten yolks, two tablespoons butter. Salt and pepper to taste. Beat well; add beaten whites of two eggs. Pile lightly in buttered baking dish and bake until puffed and brown.
A plain soufflé-style potato dish from a period when "puff" meant lightened with beaten egg white rather than whipped to a soufflé's full height. The recipe gives no oven temperature or time, both of which need supplying.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites go in last and should be folded through in a few strokes, leaving a little streaking. Beating them in, as "add" might suggest, collapses the air and gives you dense mashed potato with a browned top.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot-but-not-fierce oven suits it: 375-400F, 25-35 minutes for a shallow dish, until risen and coloured. It sets from the outside in, so a deep dish takes longer and puffs less.
- Potato temperatureThe mash must be hot when the yolks go in but not scalding when the whites arrive, or they deflate on contact. Mash, beat in milk, butter and yolks, then let it stand a minute or two before folding.
- "Two cups hot mashed potato"About 1 lb of potatoes before peeling and boiling. Use a floury variety — russet or a similar baking potato — and rice or mash it dry; waterlogged potato will not hold air.
- ButterTwo tablespoons for two cups of potato is modest by modern standards and the recipe relies on it for flavour. Butter was often sold salted, so taste before adding the salt the recipe leaves to judgement.
- Pile lightlyThe instruction is doing real work. Spoon the mixture in loosely with peaks rather than smoothing it flat; the ridges brown and the loose texture lets heat through.
- Yield and servingServes four as a side. It falls within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so it goes to the table directly — there is no holding it.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer; like Rumford's volume of the same years, it was a full general cookbook issued to keep a brand in the kitchen, with the sponsor's product concentrated in the confectionery and dessert chapters and the vegetable section left to ordinary household cooking. Potato puff belongs to a large family of American recipes for reworking mashed potato ettes, border dishes — that fill the vegetable chapters of turn-of-the-century books, reflecting a domestic economy in which leftover mash was expected to reappear rather than be discarded. The technique itself is a simplified soufflé, a French method that had been absorbed into English and American home cooking through the nineteenth century and reduced here to its essentials: a thick base, yolks for richness, whipped whites for lift, and a quick bake.