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Potatoes, Foultees
Neatly wipe eight even-sized, medium, sound, unpeeled raw potatoes, place on roasting pan, and set to bake in oven for forty minutes. Remove, clip off a small piece lengthwise to serve as covers, then with a teaspoon scoop out insides, press the potatoes through a sieve into a small saucepan, add one green pepper chopped and browned in a little butter for three minutes, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg, one ounce butter and a half gill cream. Sharply stir with wooden spoon while heating for four minutes, remove, fill up six of the potato shells with preparation, arrange covers on, reset in oven for ten minutes, remove, dress on dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A twice-baked stuffed potato with browned green pepper folded through the flesh. The method is sound; only the units and the vague oven need translating.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake the potatoes at 400F, and expect 45 to 60 minutes rather than the stated forty for anything larger than a small russet. Test with a skewer: the flesh must give no resistance, or it will not sieve smoothly.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons of white pepper is about 3/4 teaspoon, and one of nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon — a firmer hand with pepper than most modern recipes take.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 4 tablespoons. Add it warm and gradually; cold cream dropped into hot riced potato dulls the texture.
- Eight potatoes, six shellsThe recipe bakes and scoops eight but fills only six, so there is flesh to spare and two shells left over; the spares will cover any that tear while being scooped. The text does not say whether the surplus was intended or simply how the recipe was written.
- Press through a sieveA ricer or a food mill on the fine plate does this in seconds. Do not use a food processor or a blender — the starch turns gluey and no amount of butter recovers it.
- The green pepperThree minutes in butter softens it and takes off the raw edge, but does not brown it in any real sense. Chop it finely first, as the recipe directs, then give it five to six minutes over moderate heat until the edges catch, so it distributes rather than sitting in lumps.
- Cutting the lidsClip the piece lengthwise while the potatoes are still hot but handleable, and keep each lid with its own shell — they will not swap neatly.
- Yield and serviceSix stuffed potatoes, not halves: the recipe clips off only a small lengthwise piece as a cover. Enough for six as a side dish or three as a light supper. The folded napkin on the dish is period service practice.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) organised several thousand recipes into national and regional groupings, and its transliterated titles — Foultees among them — are often phonetic renderings rather than standard spellings in any language, so the name should be treated as the compiler's own approximation rather than firm evidence of origin. The dish itself is a twice-baked potato. Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the structure here is restaurant structure: bake, hollow, enrich, refill, hold, finish. The green pepper is the period detail worth noting — sweet peppers are often said to have been a relatively assertive, faintly exotic addition to a potato dish in American cookery of the 1900s, though how they were actually perceived is uncertain.