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Potato Puff
2 cups boiled potatoes 2 tablespoons butter 2 eggs 1/2 cup scalded milk Salt to taste Use left-over mashed potatoes or potatoes freshly boiled and pressed through a vegetable press. Melt the butter; beat it into the potatoes; add the egg, beaten separately, then the hot milk and seasoning. Bake in one dish or in individual dishes until delicately browned.
A plain potato soufflé in all but name. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no time, which is typical of the loose-leaf books written for cooks who already knew their range.
- "Beaten separately" is the hinge"Beaten separately" probably means the yolks and whites are beaten apart from each other, not merely apart from the potato, though the phrase can also mean no more than beating the egg in its own bowl. If you read it the first way, beat the yolks in, fold the stiffly beaten whites through last and get the dish into the oven at once -- note that this reverses the recipe's own order, which adds the milk after the egg.
- Oven temperatureBake at 375-400F. Allow 25-35 minutes for a single dish, 15-20 for individual ramekins, and stop when the top is set and lightly coloured.
- Vegetable pressA ricer or food mill. A ricer gives the driest, lightest result; do not use a food processor, which turns boiled potato to glue.
- Potato choiceUse a floury baking potato rather than a waxy one. Two cups of riced potato is roughly 1 lb of potatoes before cooking.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below boiling, when it steams and a rim of bubbles forms at the edge. Scalding is usually explained as a way of destroying souring organisms in raw milk; with pasteurised milk its main use here is to keep the mixture warm and loose so it takes the whites easily.
- Salt to tasteLeft-over mashed potatoes are already salted; freshly boiled and riced ones are not. Season the potato mixture before the whites go in and taste at that point, since you cannot stir afterwards.
- YieldAbout four servings, or four to six small ramekins. It will sink as it cools, so serve it straight from the dish.
Recipes of this kind sit at the point where the American cookbook absorbed the French souffl tyesterday's supper.