Home › Vegetables › Sweet-Potato Puff
Sweet-Potato Puff
2 cups mashed sweet potato
¼ cup milk or cream
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg
Salt and pepper
To the mashed potatoes add the melted fat, seasonings and milk. Beat the egg-yolk and white separately, add the yolk to the potato mixture and then fold in the white. Bake in one dish or in individual molds until puffy and brown.
A straightforward soufflé-style side dish whose only omission is the oven temperature. The hinge is the beaten white: fold it in and get it into a hot oven promptly, or the puff collapses before it sets.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 375F, which is hot enough to set the egg and brown the top without drying the interior. A single dish takes 25-30 minutes; individual molds 15-20.
- Dry the potatoesBaked sweet potatoes, scooped and mashed, give a far better puff than boiled ones, which carry too much water. If you boil them, drain well and let the steam off over low heat before mashing.
- "Melted fat"The instructions say melted fat where the ingredient list says butter; melt the 2 tablespoons before adding so it disperses rather than streaking the mixture.
- Warm, not hotAdd the yolk while the potato is warm but not steaming. Very hot potato will begin to set the yolk into threads.
- Folding the whiteBeat the white to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, and fold in two additions. Stiff whites break into lumps that leave hollow pockets.
- VesselsButter the dish and fill it about three-quarters full to leave room for the rise. Individual molds means ramekins or custard cups of roughly 6 ounces each.
- YieldTwo cups of mashed potato with one egg serves four as a side dish, or fills four to five ramekins. Serve straight from the oven; like any soufflé it sinks as it cools.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper only, as written. Taste the potato mixture before the white goes in, since you cannot stir it afterward.
Sweet potatoes were a Southern and mid-Atlantic staple long before they became a holiday fixture, and early twentieth-century household books like this one treated them as an ordinary vegetable rather than a sweetened dessert course. The puff belongs to a large family of egg-lightened vegetable dishes that ran through American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, alongside corn puddings, spinach soufflés, dishes that could often serve as ways of turning mashed vegetable into something presentable at table. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its recipe collections for the same readership as its magazines. The absence of an oven temperature is typical of the period, when ranges were judged by hand and experience rather than a dial.