No. 2809

Potatoes in Surprise

Pommes de Terre en Surprise

Wash and brush medium-sized potatoes, wrap them in separate sheets of damp paper; range on a baking tin, and cook in a slack oven for thirty to forty minutes; remove, unwrap and make an opening on one side of each potato; empty the contents with a small spoon, pound this to a pulp with fresh butter, salt, nutmeg and egg-yolks; refill the potatoes, close the aperture with the piece removed, and lay them on a buttered baking tin, having the opening uppermost. Push into a slack oven for twenty minutes, then dress on or inside of a folded napkin.

← No. 2808 Potatoes Souffled Potatoes & Sweet Potatoes No. 2810 Potato Tartlets →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives no quantities at all, only a method, so the proportions are yours to judge. The hinge is the shell: scoop with restraint or the potato collapses and there is nothing to refill.

"Slack oven"A slack or slow oven is usually reckoned at about 300-325F. At that heat medium potatoes will need well over an hour, not the thirty to forty minutes given; bake at 375-400F for 50-60 minutes instead, until a skewer meets no resistance in the centre.
The damp paperWet paper steams the potato and keeps the skin supple enough to cut and re-close without cracking. Damp parchment achieves the same thing; foil works but gives a slacker, wetter skin. Baking bare gives a crisp jacket that tends to split when you carve the lid.
Choose the potatoA dry, mealy variety — russet or a similar baking potato — pounds to a light pulp. Waxy new potatoes turn gluey when mashed and worked with butter.
ProportionsFor the flesh of six medium potatoes, about 3 tablespoons butter, 2 egg yolks, salt and a small grating of nutmeg is a reasonable reading. More yolk than that and the filling sets firm rather than staying fluffy.
Pound while hotThe flesh must be worked and enriched straight from the oven; cooled potato takes butter badly and turns pasty under the pestle. A ricer or food mill gives a smoother result than a masher.
Cut the lid deliberatelyTake a single oval piece from one side and keep it. Leave about a quarter-inch of flesh against the skin all round so the shell holds its shape when refilled.
The second bakingTwenty minutes at 300F only warms them through; at 375F, fifteen minutes is enough to set the filling and colour the edges of the lid.
Yield and servingOne potato per person as a garnish to a roast, two as a course on its own. The folded napkin is a period service device — it absorbs steam and keeps the potatoes upright and hot; a warmed dish lined with a cloth does the same.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a compendium of the restaurant's repertoire, and its potato chapter runs to dozens of numbered preparations — a measure of how much invention French-trained American kitchens invested in a vegetable that had been peasant food a century earlier. En surprise was a standing menu term for anything served in its own emptied shell or under a concealing crust, the surprise being that the container turns out to be edible or the contents are not what the outside suggests. The same enrichment of baked potato flesh with butter, yolk and nutmeg underlies the pommes duchesse and the twice-baked potato of later cookbooks; what dates Ranhofer's version is the damp-paper wrapping and the folded napkin, both answers to problems — uneven coal-oven heat, a long walk from range to table — that a modern kitchen no longer has.