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Stuffed Potatoes
Select medium-sized, smooth-skinned oval potatoes. Bake in a hot oven 450°F. until tender, being careful not to overbrown the skin. Cut the potatoes in two lengthwise, remove the potato pulp, being careful to leave shells unbroken. Mash the hot potato, add either milk or cream as for mashed potato.
Season as follows: To each cup of potato add 1 teaspoon salt, teaspoon pepper, ½ teaspoon onion juice and 1 teaspoon butter. Fill the shells with this mixture, rounding the surface so that it is the shape of the original potato. Bake for 10 minutes in a hot oven. Grated cheese may be sprinkled over the top.
A straightforward twice-baked potato, written when the technique still needed spelling out. The instructions hold up; only the seasoning ratios and a few practical points want comment.
- Oven temperature450°F is given outright, which is unusually helpful for a book of this vintage. Russets or another dry, floury baking potato give the fluffiest pulp and the sturdiest shell; waxy potatoes turn gluey when mashed.
- Keep the skins intactThe hinge of the dish. Leave about ¼ inch of flesh attached to the skin when you scoop, and work while the potatoes are hot but handleable — a tea towel in one hand makes this manageable.
- Salt levelA teaspoon of salt per cup of mashed potato is aggressive by current taste. Start with half and adjust.
- Pepper quantityThe pepper measure as printed has lost its fraction; season to taste rather than guessing at it.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or squeeze it in a square of muslin. A quarter teaspoon of grated onion or a pinch of onion powder substitutes cleanly if you would rather not.
- Milk or creamWarm it before beating it in; cold dairy tends to give a heavier, stiffer filling.
- YieldOne medium potato yields roughly half to three-quarters of a cup of pulp and two filled halves. Count two halves per person as a side dish.
- FinishingThe optional grated cheese browns well under a broiler for a minute or two if the ten-minute bake has not coloured it.
Refilling the shell is often said to have been a way of dressing up a plain vegetable for company without much cost, the same domestic-economy instinct that produced stuffed peppers, stuffed onions and stuffed tomatoes in the vegetable chapters of the same books. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders; its recipes lean deliberately toward the inexpensive, the nourishing and the easily taught, which is exactly what a stuffed potato is.