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Potato Souffle
(Germany.) Boil and mash 8 potatoes, press through a sieve, add 2 onions, and 2 tablespoonfuls of ham, chopped fine, and both cooked in butter, salt, pepper, and the yolks of 3 eggs, and parsley. Add finally 1/2 cup of stock, and the beaten whites of eggs. Bake in a dish, with bread-crumbs over.
A rustic potato pudding rather than a true soufflé — the potato base is far too heavy to rise much, so treat it as a light baked mash and do not expect a dramatic dome. The hinge is the egg whites: fold them in at the last moment and get the dish into the oven immediately.
- Potato quantity"8 potatoes" is unspecified; if you reckon a medium potato at roughly 5 oz, that is somewhere around 2 1/2 lb. Use a floury or all-purpose variety; waxy potatoes tend to turn gluey once riced and beaten.
- Press through a sieveA ricer or food mill does the same work faster. Do not use a food processor or blender — it develops the starch and the mixture goes to paste.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Bake at 375F, uncovered, for 35–45 minutes, until set at the centre and browned on top.
- Onions and hamTwo onions, chopped fine and softened in butter until translucent but not coloured, then the ham warmed through with them. Two tablespoons of chopped ham is a seasoning, not a filling; a thick slice of cooked ham or unsmoked gammon is closer to the German intent than deli slices.
- StockHalf a cup of stock into 2 1/2 lb of potato is enough to loosen the mixture, no more. Add it while the potato is warm and check the texture before the whites go in — it should drop heavily from the spoon, not pour.
- The whitesThree whites, beaten to soft peaks. Stir a spoonful into the potato to slacken it, then fold in the rest in two additions. Overmixing here is what turns the dish dense.
- The crumb toppingDry breadcrumbs scattered over the top, dotted with butter, will brown properly; fresh soft crumbs alone tend to sit pale and damp. Butter the baking dish and dust it with crumbs as well.
- YieldServes six as a side dish, four as a supper course with a salad. Serve straight from the dish — it slumps as it cools and does not reheat well.
This is one of the national dishes that appears in Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902), a compilation of foreign recipes that toured European home cooking for American readers at a moment when the term "soufflé" was being applied generously to anything lightened with beaten egg white. The German original behind it belongs to the family of Kartoffelauflauf " or baup" or baked pudding — a thrifty way to turn leftover potatoes, a scrap of ham and a few eggs into a dish that could carry a meal. Potatoes had been thoroughly naturalised in German cooking since the eighteenth century, and the browned, crumb-topped Auflauf was among the homely dishes such a compilation might take as representative.