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Stuffed Potatoes
Bake six potatoes. When done, cut a lengthwise slice; scoop out the potato with a spoon. Mash; add one tablespoon butter, salt, pepper, one half cup milk, and two eggs, whites beaten stiff. Refill skins with this mixture. Pile lightly, do not smooth, and bake until potatoes are puffed and brown.
A clear, workable recipe that needs only a few numbers the original assumes you know. The egg instruction is the one place the wording is genuinely compressed.
- The eggs"Two eggs, whites beaten stiff" is compressed wording; the usual reading is that you separate the eggs, beat the yolks into the hot mashed potato, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites at the end. The fold is what produces the puff; stir it in hard and you get an ordinary mash.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe specifies none. In a modern oven, roughly 400F for about an hour will do for the first bake, until the skins are crisp and a skewer slides through; the filled skins can go back into the same oven for 15-20 minutes to brown the tops, which is the only doneness cue the original gives.
- Work while hotScoop and mash the flesh as soon as the potatoes can be handled. Potato that has cooled is harder to mash smoothly and takes up the butter and milk less readily.
- The milkHalf a cup for six potatoes is generous with modern varieties. Warm it and add it gradually, stopping when the mash is soft but still holds a shape; a slack mixture will not stand up in peaks.
- Keeping the skinsLeave about a quarter inch of potato attached to the shell. Scooped bare, the skins slump under the filling.
- Pile lightlyThe instruction not to smooth the tops is deliberate. Rough peaks catch the heat and brown, which is the whole visual point of the dish; a flat surface just dries out.
- YieldSix potatoes, one each as a side dish, or twelve halves if you split them lengthwise rather than taking off a single slice.
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 — one of many firms that discovered a general-purpose cookbook was a durable form of advertising. Stuffed potatoes of this kind are often linked to the French pommes duchesse, egg-enriched mashed potato piped and browned, though the line of descent is not documented; the period habit of returning an enriched mash to the skin is what distinguishes the American versions. Cookery writing of the 1890s and 1900s was notably enthusiastic about lightness achieved by whipped whites, applying the trick to omelets, puddings, fritters and, here, the humble baked potato.