Home › Vegetables › Potato Puffs
Potato Puffs
One cup of cold mashed potato, mix with one egg, shape and cook in boiling lard.
A three-line recipe that assumes a cook who already knows how deep frying works. The proportions are sound; the gaps are temperature, seasoning and how wet the potato may be.
- Fat temperature"Boiling lard" means fat at frying heat, not literally boiling; lard begins to smoke somewhere in the region of 375–400F depending on how it was rendered and refined. Hold it at 350–365F so the puffs colour in two to three minutes without soaking.
- Fat substitutionLard fries beautifully and is still sold, but any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. Butter will not; it burns well below frying temperature.
- The mixture must be stiffThis is the hinge. Cold mashed potato made with much milk or cream will slacken once the egg goes in and the puffs will fall apart in the fat. If the mixture will not hold a shape on the spoon, work in a spoonful of flour and chill it before frying.
- SeasoningThe original gives none; presumably the leftover mash was already salted, though the recipe does not say. Taste the mixture before shaping and add salt, pepper and perhaps grated onion or chopped parsley.
- ShapingSmall balls or flattened cakes an inch or so across cook through in the time it takes to brown. Anything larger will colour outside before the centre heats.
- Egg sizeEggs were not graded as they are now, and one may have run smaller than a modern large egg. One cup of mash to one large egg is workable; two cups to one egg gives a firmer, easier-handled mixture.
- YieldAbout eight to ten small puffs — a side dish for two or three. Drain on paper and serve at once, as they soften as they cool.
Recipes of this kind exist because nobody threw away mashed potato. Household cookbooks of this sort are full of one-line directions for reworking yesterday's vegetables into something that could go to table without apology, and potato puffs, potato cakes and potato croquettes are variations on one idea at three levels of ambition — the croquette breaded and shaped, the cake fried in a skillet, the puff simply bound with egg and dropped into deep fat. Lard was an ordinary frying medium in American kitchens well into the twentieth century, cheap and rendered at home or bought by the pail, and its displacement by vegetable shortening and then by liquid oils is one of the clearer markers separating books like this one from those written a few decades later.