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Potato Puff or Soufflé
2 cups hot mashed potatoes 2 tablespoons butter 2 eggs
1 cup milk
To the mashed potatoes add the fat, the egg-yolks which have been beaten until very light, and the milk. Stir until well blended and then fold in the stiffly beaten egg-whites. Mix lightly and pile the mass into a well-greased baking-dish. Bake in a moderate oven about ten minutes. Serve at once.
A plain potato soufflé of the kind that turned leftover mash into a company dish. The recipe is sound, but two things in it need attention: the baking time and the missing seasoning.
- Moderate ovenIn books of this era "moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. For a souffle, the upper end of that range gives a better lift and a set edge without drying the middle.
- Ten minutes is optimisticTwo cups of potato with a cup of milk and two eggs' worth of structure will not set through in ten minutes. Expect 25 to 35 minutes in a 1 1/2-quart dish, until the top is browned and the centre no longer wobbles as a liquid. Ten minutes would only work if the mixture were spread thin in a shallow pan.
- No salt is listedThe recipe assumes the mashed potatoes were already seasoned. If yours are not, add about 3/4 teaspoon salt and a good grind of pepper before folding in the whites; there is no way to correct it afterward.
- The hinge is the foldingGet the potato base warm but not hot before the whites go in, and fold in three additions with a light hand. Hot potato deflates beaten whites on contact, and overmixing turns the whole thing into a dense pudding.
- "Fat" means the butterThe instruction to "add the fat" refers to the two tablespoons of butter in the ingredient list. Melt it into the hot potato so it disperses evenly.
- ConsistencyA cup of milk to two cups of potato gives a slack batter, which is correct here. Mashed potato varies a good deal in stiffness, so add the milk gradually and stop when the base drops thickly from a spoon rather than pouring.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart baking dish, greased and set on a sheet pan, serves four as a side. Serve it straight from the oven — like any soufflé it falls within a few minutes, which is why the original says "at once."
Potato souffles appear in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often in the vegetable chapter and often as a way of dressing up mashed potatoes left from a previous meal. The Butterick book, published by the pattern company for a readership of home sewers and homemakers, sits in this tradition: economical, egg-leavened, and designed to look like more than it cost. The dual title pairs the plain English "puff" with "souffle," the French term American housekeepers were increasingly expected to know.