Liza Minnelli's Favorite 5-Ingredient Appetizer Makes Us Love Her Even More

There’s no argument about it: Liza Minnelli is a national treasure. And, as if any one of us needed another reason to fall head over heels for the legendary performer, we recently learned that Minnelli (much like us) is a sucker for comfort food.

Not just any comfort food, but one of our all-time favorites: potatoes. We get it, Liza, we’ve never met a potato we didn’t like either.

“I love savory foods, I love comfort foods,” Minnelli told reporter Johna Blinn in 1970. “Comfort foods are baked potatoes with sour cream, pepper, and butter or cream cheese on hot rye toast. Comfort food is anything you just sort of yum, yum, yum.”

It sounds like Minnelli’s love of comfort food stemmed from her mother—the equally iconic—Judy Garland’s cooking.

“My mother taught me to cook. She cooked everything from shepherd’s pie to chocolate souffle and big pot roasts,” Minnelli said. 

Between roasts, potatoes, and lasagna, we'd say Minnelli would fit right in with the Allrecipes home cooks.

Liza Minnelli's Favorite 5-Ingredient Appetizer

While Minnelli likely isn’t throwing the same dinner parties she raved about in Blinn’s article, her recipes still hold up—especially her five-ingredient potato appetizer. The “potato shells”—or potato skins, as you probably know them—are the ultimate comfort food, just as Minnelli had described. 

They’re baked potato skins topped with butter, sour cream, salt, and pepper. But because she’s Liza Minnelli, they have caviar and some vodka, too.

“You eat it like a hot dog. It’s comfort food, I’m telling you,” she said.

But a fluffy, crunchy potato topped with caviar? Someone get Minnelli to Martha Stewart’s Las Vegas Bedford restaurant to try the iconic baked potato; she’d truly be in comfort food paradise.

We get it, though, vodka sounds weird—however, Minnelli explains that the vodka is used more to tie the whole dish together rather than bring a fiery flavor.

“You can’t taste the vodka, what it does is take away the salt from the caviar and blend everything else in,” she said.

How To Make Liza Minelli's Potato Shells

The recipe, published in Blinn’s “Celebrity Cookbook,” calls for 4 baking potatoes, 4 teaspoons of sweet butter, salt, freshly ground pepper, 1 cup of sour cream, 4 tablespoons of caviar, and 2 jiggers of vodka.

You bake the potatoes in a 425-degree F oven for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until the inside is soft and fluffy and the shell is crispy. Then, you cut the potatoes in half and scoop out about half of the flesh. In the hollowed-out shell, add 1/2 teaspoon of butter, salt, pepper, sour cream, 1/2 teaspoon of caviar, and vodka.

Minnelli doesn’t give measurements for the sour cream or vodka—but based on the ingredient list, you’d use 2 tablespoons of sour cream and 1/4 jigger of vodka (or about 3/4 tablespoon).

“Serve at once as finger food to go with cocktails,” the recipe reads.

While we probably all can’t top our potatoes with caviar—and might not want to douse them in vodka—the base recipe for Minnelli’s potato skins still holds up on its own.

So, next time you need an easy, classic recipe, take a page from this icon's book and whip up Liza Minnelli's famed potato shells.