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Surprise Potatoes
Bone a dozen small birds and stuff them with sausage meat; then select twelve large potatees of equal size, wash them well, leaving the skins on, cut a piece off the top of each potato and scoop out the inside. Put a bird in each potato. Then make a stiff paste of flour and of egg and use it to stick on the tops of the potatoes; lay them on a baking-tin and bake in a brisk oven for about three-quarters of an hour. Arrange them on a hot dish previously covered with a dish-paper or folded napkin, and serve.
A late-nineteenth-century banquet trick: the potato is both cooking vessel and serving dish, and the guest finds a whole boned bird inside. Most of the work is butchery and carving, not cooking.
- What "small birds" meantIn the 1890s this covered reed birds (bobolinks), larks, snipe, plover and thrushes, sold by the dozen in American markets. Most are now protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and cannot be bought or sold, though a few, such as Wilson's snipe, remain legal game. Farmed quail, sold boned or semi-boned, is the practical modern substitute, though larger than a reed bird or lark.
- BoningThe carcass is worked out while leaving the skin intact, either through a cut down the back or through the cavity openings, with the wing and leg bones left in or taken out entirely. A poulterer or good butcher will do it; boned quail is also sold frozen.
- Sausage meatSausage meat of the period was generally seasoned pork, roughly ground, though some versions carried breadcrumbs or rusk. Use bulk breakfast sausage or ground pork seasoned with salt, pepper, sage and a little thyme. Stuff loosely — packed tight, it will not heat through inside two layers of insulation.
- A brisk ovenRoughly 400–425F, though period equivalents vary. The potato shells need that heat to cook through in the time given.
- Doneness is the real issueRaw pork inside a bird inside a sealed potato is well insulated, and forty-five minutes is optimistic. Check with a probe through the potato into the centre of the stuffing and look for 165F; expect to need an hour or more with larger potatoes.
- Choosing and hollowing the potatoesLarge baking potatoes of matched size, about 10–12 oz each. Cut the lid off the long side rather than the end so the potato sits flat, and leave a shell about half an inch thick — thinner and it collapses when you lift it.
- The flour-and-egg pasteA stiff luting paste of flour beaten with whole egg, no more than that. It is a seal, not a pastry, and it goes on the cut edge to hold the lid in place; it browns and hardens in the oven and is not meant to be eaten.
- Dish-paperA perforated doily of white paper laid on the platter to absorb fat and keep the potatoes from sliding. A folded napkin does the same job and is easier to find.
- YieldTwelve, one per person as a course, or two apiece for six as a main dish.
Oscar Tschirky was not a cook — he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 book collected the kitchen's repertoire at the moment American hotel dining was at its most French and most ostentatious. "Surprise" dishes, where one food is concealed inside another and revealed at the table, were a standing device of that cooking, and the hollowed potato was the cheapest possible container for the most expensive possible filling. The small birds themselves tell you more about the period than the technique does: reed birds, larks and plover were sold by the dozen in New York markets in the 1890s and treated as ordinary luxury poultry, the smallest of them, such as reed birds, roasted whole and eaten bones and all. Market hunting on that scale was one of several pressures behind the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which prohibited the commercial traffic and left recipes like this one stranded — perfectly workable, but with the main ingredient no longer legally obtainable.