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Potatoes, Bignon
Neatly wipe six medium, round, sound, unpeeled potatoes. Place them on a tin and bake in the oven for forth minutes. Remove, cut in a halve, scoop out the "meat" and place in a bowl, keeping the shells. Seasoning with a teaspoon salt two saltspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding one gill hot milk, one tablespoon good butter. Lightly brown for two minutes in one teaspoon butter, two skinned and sliced country sausages and six very finely chopped shallots and add it to the potatoes. Mix well with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Then fill up the potato shells with the mixture. Place on a tin; sprinkle a tablespoon grated Permesan cheese over them, equally divided. Place in a hot oven and bake for ten minutes, or until a nice golden color. Remove, place on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A twice-baked stuffed potato with sausage, shallot and Parmesan. The original is loosely punctuated and one word is a typo, but the method is clear enough to follow directly.
- "Forth minutes"Read this as forty minutes. Whole medium potatoes at 400F take 45 to 60 minutes to bake through; test with a skewer before splitting them rather than trusting the clock.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Add the hot milk gradually — potato varieties differ in how much they absorb, and the filling should hold its shape when mounded back into the shells.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is half a teaspoon of white pepper and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg for six potatoes, which is assertive but in period character.
- "A hot oven"425 to 450F for the final ten-minute browning. The first baking of the whole potatoes is better at a moderate 400F so the skins dry and firm without scorching.
- Country sausagesFresh, coarse-ground pork sausage in a casing, which is why the recipe says to skin them. Two minutes of browning will not cook raw sausage through — break it up and cook it fully before it goes into the potato, and do not rely on the ten-minute finishing bake to do it.
- Keeping the shellsLeave about a quarter inch of flesh attached to the skin. Scooped completely clean, the halves collapse when refilled.
- Yield and serviceTwelve filled halves, serving six as a side or four as a light supper dish. The folded napkin on the serving dish is a standard convention of restaurant service in this period.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it follows the restaurant habit of attaching a proper name to a garnish or preparation. Dishes labelled Bignon are generally traced to Louis Bignon, the Parisian restaurateur who ran the Café Foy and the Café Riche in the middle of the nineteenth century and was one of the first restaurant men in France to be decorated with the Legion of Honour; his name attached itself to a scatter of dishes in the classical repertoire, not all of which he had anything to do with. The dish itself is a twice-baked potato, a form that turns up across late Victorian and Edwardian cookery because it solved a practical problem: baked potatoes could be started early, and the shells refilled and browned to order. The Parmesan and nutmeg give it the character of a restaurant preparation rather than a domestic one.