Home › Potatoes › Potatoes Baked in Half Shell
Potatoes Baked in Half Shell
Select six medium-sized potatoes and bake, following recipe for Baked Potatoes. Remove from oven, cut slice from top of each, and scoop out inside. Mash, add two tablespoons butter, salt, pepper, and three tablespoons hot milk; then add whites two eggs well beaten. Refill skins, and bake five to eight minutes in very hot oven. Potatoes may be sprinkled with grated cheese before putting in oven.
A twice-baked potato in its original form, from Fannie Farmer's kitchen. The method holds up; only a few of the instructions need translating.
- Baking the potatoes firstThe cross-referenced "Baked Potatoes" would have meant scrubbed potatoes baked in a hot oven, roughly 45 to 60 minutes, until a skewer slides through easily; the original gives no temperature in degrees, so 425F is a modern equivalent rather than the book's own figure. Do not wrap in foil; the skins need to dry and firm up if they are to hold the filling.
- "Very hot oven"The book gives no degrees; "very hot" is conventionally read today as about 450 to 500F. Five to eight minutes at that heat is enough to set the surface and take on colour, not to heat the filling through, so work while the potatoes are still hot from the first bake.
- Egg whites, not whole eggsThe recipe calls for the whites well beaten and folded into the mash to lighten it. Whole eggs will make a denser, custardier filling. Folded gently and refilled at once, the tops should rise a little.
- Scooping the shellsLeave about a quarter inch of potato on the skin. Any thinner and the shells slump when refilled; any thicker and you will not have enough mash to fill six.
- Hot milkThe milk is specified hot because cold liquid cools the potato and gives a stiff, heavy mash; glueyness itself comes mainly from overworking. Warm the milk before it goes in, and rice or mash the potato while it is still steaming.
- SeasoningTwo tablespoons butter and three of milk for six potatoes is a restrained hand by modern standards. Taste and adjust before the whites go in, since you cannot stir much afterwards.
- The cheeseGrated cheese here would have meant a dry, hard cheese of the kind that grates; Parmesan and hard American cheese were both in use. A tablespoon or so over each top browns nicely in the short second bake.
- YieldSix potatoes, one per person as a side dish. They can be filled several hours ahead and refrigerated, but then need 20 to 25 minutes at 400F rather than the brief blast specified.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book first appeared in 1896, and its potato chapter is a fair index of what the American middle-class table expected of a vegetable that had, within living memory, been regarded as plain fare. Stuffing a baked potato back into its own skin was a way of dressing it up without expense, and the beaten egg whites belong to the same late-Victorian enthusiasm for lightness that produced soufflés, puffed omelets and whipped cream on everything. Farmer's real contribution was not the dish but the manner of writing it down: she is credited with popularising the level measurement, and the flat precision of "two tablespoons butter... three tablespoons hot milk" is exactly the style that made the book a fixture in American kitchens for the next half-century. The suggestion of grated cheese, tacked on at the end, is the kind of optional flourish she used throughout to let a cook stretch one recipe into two.