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Stuffed Potato
Follow directions for potatoes on the half-shell, adding one-half cup peanut butter and two egg-whites to the potato mixture.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's "potatoes on the half-shell" in front of you, which is baked potatoes halved lengthwise, the flesh scooped out and mashed with butter, hot milk and seasoning, then piled back into the skins and returned to the oven to brown. The peanut butter and egg whites are the only changes.
- The hinge: fold the whites in lastThe hinge: how the whites go in -- The recipe says only to add two egg-whites to the potato mixture; it does not say whether to beat them. If you beat them to soft peaks and fold them into the potato once it has cooled to warm, not hot, the filling stays lighter under the weight of the peanut butter; mound loosely into the shells rather than packing them.
- Whether to beat the whites at allThe original does not say. Stirred in raw they simply bind and enrich; beaten they lighten. Either reading is defensible for a book of this period, though beaten gives the better result.
- Peanut butter of the periodEarly commercial peanut butter was unsweetened, unstabilised and quite loose. Use natural peanut butter with no added sugar; a modern sweetened, hydrogenated brand will read as dessert alongside the potato.
- OvenBake the potatoes at 400F until quite soft, then return the filled shells to the same 400F oven for 15 to 20 minutes to set the egg white and colour the tops.
- SeasoningA fatty addition like peanut butter can mute the seasoning, so season the mashed potato more assertively than you would plain; a scrape of nutmeg or a little cayenne keeps the filling from tasting flat and sweet.
Peanut butter arrived in American home cooking with unusual speed. It was introduced to a wide public at the St. Louis exposition of 1904 -- an earlier debut at the 1893 Chicago exposition is often claimed but poorly documented -- promoted first as an invalid and sanitarium food -- easily digested protein for people who could not chew meat -- and by the time the Butterick Publishing Company assembled this collection it had moved into the general grocery trade. Recipes of this vintage seem often to treat it as a savoury pantry staple on the order of butter or cheese rather than as a sandwich filling for children, which may be why it turns up folded into a potato in the vegetable chapter. Stuffing it into a baked potato with egg white also reflects the period's interest in "meatless" main dishes that still delivered visible nourishment, a preoccupation shared by the domestic-science writers and the vegetarian health reformers who did much to popularise ground peanuts in the first place.