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Stuffed Potatoes
Select smooth potatoes and have them as near the same size as possible. Bake them thoroughly. Cut off an end from each, scoop out the potato and season it with butter, salt and pepper. Add also two tablespoons of milk to every six potatoes, beating well. Return the potato pulp to the shells, stand each on end, return to oven for five minutes. POTATO BALLS, No. 1-Mix cold mashed potato with beaten egg yolk; make into balls; place on a buttered pan; make a depression in the top of each ball, put a bit of butter in the depression, and brown in the oven.
POTATO BALLS, No. 2-These are generally served with fish. With a vegetable scoop, cut two quarts of balls out of raw potatoes, boil them twelve minutes, and drain. Add to them one teaspoon of lemon juice; one-half teaspoon of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper; one tablespoon of parsley; three tablespoons of butter. Chop the parsley fine, stir all the seasoning into the balls, and serve at once.
POTATO CHIPS or SARATOGA POTATOES-Pare the potatoes, shave them very thin, and soak them for one-half hour in cold salted water; then drain them in a colander, and spread upon a dry towel. Fry a few at a time in very hot fat, one minute being usually sufficient to brown and cook them properly; and lay them on brown paper to drain. Sprinkle lightly with salt; and when needed at table, heat quickly in the oven. In cool weather enough potato chips may be cooked at one time to last a week or ten days. They should be kept in a cool, dry place.
Four potato preparations run together under one heading, as was common in turn-of-the-century books. The oven work is straightforward; the frying instructions are the ones that need translating into numbers.
- Baking the shells"Bake them thoroughly" means baked right through, until a skewer meets no resistance; in a modern oven that is roughly an hour for a large russet at a hot setting. Underbaked potatoes tear when you scoop them, and the shells collapse when stood on end.
- Standing on endCutting off an end rather than splitting the potato lengthwise is deliberate: the potato becomes a little cup that sits upright on the plate. Trim a thin slice off the base if it wobbles, and give the refilled shells 5-10 minutes at 400F to set the top.
- Proportions for the fillingTwo tablespoons of milk per six potatoes is a dry, firm filling by modern standards. Butter and salt are left to taste in the original; figure about a tablespoon of butter per potato and salt to taste.
- Potato Balls No. 2 timingTwelve minutes is right for scooped balls about an inch across, but check at eight. They are dressed and served immediately with no second cooking, so any that go soft will break up when you stir in the seasoning.
- A vegetable scoopThis is what is now sold as a melon baller or Parisienne scoop. Two quarts of balls is a large quantity — allow four to five pounds of potatoes, and expect a good deal of trim left over for soup.
- Fat temperature for the chips"Very hot fat" here means 350-365F. One minute is realistic only at that temperature and with genuinely thin slices; a mandoline set fine gives the right thickness. Fry in small batches so the fat does not crash.
- The cold-water soakThe half hour in salted water rinses off surface starch, which is what keeps the slices from welding together and gives a clean, brittle chip. Drying them thoroughly afterward matters as much as the soak.
- Brown paperSubstitute paper towels or a wire rack. Salt while still hot so it adheres.
- Keeping chips a week or ten daysThis assumes an unheated pantry and probably an animal fat, though the recipe does not say which fat to use. In a modern kitchen, chips fried in vegetable oil will go stale and taste rancid well before ten days, even in an airtight tin. The reheating in the oven is for crispness, not safety.
Saratoga potatoes take their name from Saratoga Springs, New York, the fashionable summer resort where the very thin fried potato slice became a house specialty in the 1850s; the invention is traditionally credited to George Crum, a cook at Moon's Lake House, though the story is anecdotal and the details vary with the telling. By the time the Butterick company issued its cook book the two names were interchangeable, and the recipe belongs firmly to the era before commercial packaging — the instruction to fry a week's supply in cool weather and keep it in a dry place is a reminder that a chip was something a household made, not something it bought. The grouping of four preparations under one heading is also of its period: potatoes were cheap and endlessly present, and a cook was expected to vary them by shape and finish rather than by ingredient.