Home › Vegetarian Dishes › Watercress (Baked potatoes Split potatoes)
Watercress (Baked potatoes Split potatoes)
3 baked potatoes Split potatoes in halves lengthways. Scoop out centers, rub them through a sieve, add seasonings, melted Crisco, yolk of egg, eg and cream. Beat well till light, then put mixture into forcing bag with tube, force into potato cases which should be dried. Heat in moderate oven. Sprinkle a little chopped parsley on top and serve decorated with watercress. Sufficient for three potatoes.
A stuffed baked potato, written in the clipped shorthand of a promotional cookbook that assumed the reader already knew the dish. The text is garbled in one place and gives no quantities for the enrichments, so treat the amounts as a matter of judgement.
- The garbled line"add seasonings, melted Crisco, yolk of egg, eg and cream" appears to be a typesetting error; "eg" may be a stray fragment of "egg". Read it as seasoning to taste, melted fat, an egg yolk and a little cream.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For three potatoes, roughly 2 tablespoons melted fat, one yolk and 2 to 3 tablespoons cream will bind the flesh without slackening it. Add the cream last and stop while the mixture still holds a shape.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, but for a potato filling butter gives far more flavour; it carries water and milk solids, so it is not an exact substitute in behaviour. Vegetable fat was marketed in part to cooks who wanted to avoid lard or butter.
- Drying the casesThis is the hinge. Return the emptied skins to a hot oven for five to ten minutes before filling; a damp shell steams and collapses under the piped filling.
- Forcing bag with tubeA piping bag; the book does not say which tube, though a star tube is the usual choice for this kind of piped potato. The potato must be sieved rather than mashed or it will block the tube -- a ricer or fine sieve, never a food processor, which turns potato to glue.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F in period usage. The recipe gives no time; twenty to twenty-five minutes should heat through and colour the ridges, and a few minutes under the broiler will brown pale tops.
- Parsley and watercressAdd the parsley after baking, not before, or it blackens. The watercress is a raw garnish and belongs on the plate, dressed lightly if at all.
- YieldThe book's "sufficient for three potatoes" describes the amount of filling, not portions. Three potatoes give six halves.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no culinary tradition behind it: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911, which was neither butter nor lard and needed a cookbook to explain itself. Stuffed and piped potatoes were already standard restaurant work, descended from the French pommes duchesse family in which sieved potato is enriched with yolk and cream and forced through a star tube; the book's real argument is that a vegetable fat let a cook build rich dishes without meat drippings. The watercress garnish and the instruction to "decorate" are period habits -- a plate was expected to be dressed, and cress was a common green to do it with.