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Potato Puff
4 cups hot mashed potatoes 2 eggs 4 tablespoons milk
Salt to taste
2 tablespoons butter
¼ teaspoon paprika
Cook the potatoes until they are mealy (not watery); mash, add seasoning, milk and butter; beat until they are very light and fluffy. Beat the egg yolks until they are light lemon colored; add to the potatoes; then add the whites of eggs which have been beaten stiff. Chopped mushrooms or minced onions may be added. Turn into a buttered baking dish and bake in a hot oven until brown. Serve at once.
A soufflé-style potato dish that depends entirely on air held in the beaten whites. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: fold, do not beatThe yolks are stirred in, but the stiff whites must be folded through in two or three additions with a spatula. Stirring them in collapses the foam and you get a dense potato bake instead of a puff.
- "Hot oven"In period usage this generally means something in the range of 400-450F. Expect a 2-quart dish to brown and set in something like 25-35 minutes; a shallower dish browns faster. The recipe gives no time, only "until brown."
- Mealy potatoesRussets or another high-starch baking potato. Waxy red or new potatoes hold water and give a gluey, heavy mixture no amount of beating will lighten. Drain them well and let the steam escape before mashing.
- Work while hotFour cups of hot mashed potato is roughly 2 to 2.5 lb of raw potatoes. The butter and milk go into the potatoes while they are still hot, as the recipe directs; if the mixture is very hot when the whites go in, the heat will begin to set them.
- The optional add-insMushrooms and onions should be cooked first and any liquid driven off. Raw mushrooms release water into the mixture as it bakes and weigh the puff down.
- Serve at once means itThe instruction is not politeness. Like any soufflé it begins to sink within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- YieldServes six as a side dish, four generously.
Potato puff belongs to a family of American dishes that took a soufflé technique and applied it to plain, cheap material — potato, hominy, rice, corn — as a way of turning leftovers or a starch side into something that looked like a course. Cookbooks of the era print puffs, soufflés and "snows" in overlapping ways, with no fixed distinction between the terms. Paprika of this sort is often associated with early twentieth-century American home cooking, where it was valued for the color it gave a pale browned surface as much as for flavor. A puff could be assembled from potatoes already cooked for another meal, which is the sort of economy such recipes were built to encourage.