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Stuffed Potatoes
(Kate B. Vaughn) 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 6 large potatoes 2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese 1 yolk of egg Salt and pepper to taste Wash six well shaped white potatoes and rub skin with Crisco. Bake until tender, cut slice off one end, and with a teaspoon remove all potato from shells. Mash the potato, adding Crisco, cheese, seasonings, and egg yolk. Refill shells and bake fifteen minutes. Serve hot on napkin. Sufficient for six potatoes.
Vegetables
A twice-baked potato from a promotional cookbook, so the fat is the point. The method is sound; only the missing temperatures and the vanished serving convention need translating.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes a cook who knows her range. Bake the potatoes at 400F until a skewer slides through the center, roughly 55-70 minutes for large russets, and return the filled shells to the same oven for the final fifteen minutes.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold today in a reformulated low-trans-fat version. Two tablespoons of melted butter gives better flavor in the filling; oil or shortening rubbed on the skins keeps them from splitting.
- "White potatoes"This means ordinary potatoes as distinct from sweet potatoes, not a specific variety. Choose a dry, mealy baker such as russet; waxy potatoes mash gluey.
- Cutting the shellsSlicing an end off rather than splitting lengthwise, as the recipe directs, leaves a deeper cup that holds more filling but is fiddly to hollow. A teaspoon or a melon baller works; leave about a quarter inch of potato on the skin so the shell holds its shape.
- The cheeseTwo tablespoons of grated cheese for six potatoes is a seasoning, not a topping. A sharp aged cheddar or dry Parmesan is what the quantity implies; use more if you want cheese to be the dish.
- Egg yolkOne yolk binds and enriches six potatoes' worth of mash. Beat it in only after the potato has cooled slightly so it thickens rather than scrambles, and note that the second bake cooks it through.
- Serve hot on napkinPeriod service: a folded linen napkin on the platter absorbs steam and keeps the potatoes from sliding. A rack or a bed of coarse salt does the same job now.
- YieldThe recipe states only 'Sufficient for six potatoes'; it gives no number of eaters, though one potato per person is the usual assumption for a side dish.
Crisco went on sale in 1911, and this recipe, credited to Kate B. Vaughn, is advertising as much as cookery: it finds a place for the new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening even where a cook would have reached for butter or drippings. Attaching the name of a domestic-science writer to a recipe was a device that lent an unfamiliar industrial fat the authority of a figure women readers already trusted. The stuffed or twice-baked potato itself was not new; it appears in American and English cookery well before Crisco existed. What the recipe records is the moment a manufactured fat began working its way into dishes that had never needed it.