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May 9
Menu: Broiled Bluefish; Souffle Potatoes, Austrian Style; Spinach; Radish Roses; a; Coffee Jelly, Whipped Cream; Sponge Cakes Coffee; Souffle Potatoes, Austrian Style- Select 6 large even-sized potatoes, wash and scrub them, and when dry bake them in hot oven until done. Cut off small portion of skin and remove inside part while hot. Rub this quickly through sieve into a basin, add 1 tablespoon cream, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste, and work in 4 yolks of eggs. Beat whites of eggs to stiff froth froth, and stir lightly into mixture. Fill potato shells with this, and bake slowly for about 1/2 hour, or long enough for mixture to rise, and surface of it to brown. If liked, a little grated cheese can be incorporated with mixture and sprinkled over top of potatoes just before baking second time.
A baked-potato soufflé served in its own shell, from the promotional cookbook that introduced Crisco to American kitchens. The quantities are workable as written; the only real vagueness is oven heat.
- Two ovens, two temperaturesThe book gives no numbers. The first bake is in a "hot oven," which by the conventions of the period is roughly 425F; large potatoes may need an hour. The second, "slowly," would be something like 325-350F; the mixture needs gentle heat to rise without setting the surface too fast.
- The hinge: work hot, bake at onceRice or sieve the flesh while it is still steaming, beat in yolks and seasoning off the heat, then fold the whites in last and fill the shells immediately. A filled shell left standing on the counter deflates and will not recover in the oven.
- Egg countFour yolks are specified; the recipe does not say how many whites, though four is the natural reading. Either way it is a high proportion of egg for six potatoes, which is what gives the lift. Fold the whites in with a spatula in two or three additions rather than stirring them in as the text suggests.
- CriscoOne tablespoon of shortening for six potatoes is a token amount here, included because the book exists to sell the product. Butter gives better flavor in a dish this plain and works perfectly well, though it is not a like-for-like fat.
- Cutting the shells"Cut off small portion of skin" most likely means a lid off the top rather than a lengthwise split. Leave a thin layer of flesh against the skin so the shell holds its shape when filled.
- NutmegA restrained pinch, freshly grated if possible. Along with the cheese option it may be all that the "Austrian Style" label rests on.
- Yield and timingSix filled shells, enough for six as a side dish. Total time runs to something like two hours because of the double bake, so the first bake can be done well ahead and the flesh reheated briefly before mixing.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had launched its hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" gave a dated menu for every day of the year — this one belongs to May 10 — a common device in early twentieth-century household books, meant to relieve the cook of deciding and, incidentally, to keep the sponsoring product in daily use. The dish itself is a stuffed potato soufflé of a kind said to have been long established in French and Austrian kitchens, related to pommes duchesse but lightened with beaten whites; "Austrian Style" in American cookbooks of the period is often taken to have signalled little more than the presence of nutmeg, cream, or grated cheese, though the point is hard to pin down. The recipe is a fair example of the book's method: take an established restaurant dish, insert a tablespoon of Crisco where butter or lard once stood, and let the substitution pass without comment.