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Potato Puffs with Cheese
1 cup mashed potatoes 1/4 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup grated cheese Beat the potatoes and milk together until thoroughly mixed. Add the salt, and beat thoroughly. Finally add the cheese. Bake in muffin tins in a slow oven ten or fifteen minutes.
A similar dish may be made by scooping out the inside of a baked potato, and mixing it with cheese as above. Fill the potato skin shell with the mixture, return to the oven, and bake until light brown.
A two-ingredient side dish that lives or dies on the consistency of the mashed potato. Everything else is a matter of oven temperature and reading the original's silences.
- Start with stiff potatoThere is no egg and no flour here, so the only structure comes from the potato itself. Use dry, floury mashed potato with no added butter or cream; if the mash is already loose, hold back part of the quarter cup of milk or the puffs will slump into the tin.
- "Slow oven"In books of this period a slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 300F. At that heat ten to fifteen minutes will set the mixture but leave it pale. The stuffed-skin variation asks for light brown, which will need a hotter oven or a few minutes under the broiler; the recipe itself gives no second temperature.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe does not say which. A firm, dry aged cheese of the kind sold as store cheese or American cheddar suits it, grated fine. Modern pre-shredded cheese is coated with anti-caking starch and gives a slightly grainy result; grate your own from a block.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon assumes unsalted mashed potato and a mild cheese. Taste before baking, since leftover mash is usually salted already and aged cheddar brings plenty of its own.
- Grease the tinsThe recipe does not say to, but cheese and potato weld to metal as they cool, so butter the pan. Let the puffs stand two minutes before lifting them out.
- The stuffed-skin versionBake the potatoes whole first, halve them lengthwise, and leave a shell thick enough to hold its shape. This is essentially the dish known as the twice-baked potato.
- YieldOne cup of mashed potato fills four to six standard muffin cups, enough as a side for two. The recipe scales up directly.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a broader American interest in cooking without meat, an interest the Food Administration's meatless and wheatless days of 1917-18 would later sharpen, though the book circulated in editions predating US entry into the war. The point of such cooking was to show that a family could get its protein elsewhere, and cheese was the workhorse of that argument: shelf-stable and domestically produced in quantity. Potato and cheese baked together is far older than any wartime campaign, of course, and the variation given here scooping a baked potato, mixing the flesh with cheese and returning it to the shell is the twice-baked potato in all but name, a dish often said to have a long history in English and American cookery and one that never really left.