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Puree of Potatoes
Peel, wash and cut seven or eight good potatoes into slices, put them into a pan with two ounces of butter, some mignonette pepper, salt, and small quantity of nutmeg; mix with them a pint of white broth, cover the pan and place on the fire to boil. By the time the broth is reduced the potatoes will be about done; then add a teacup of cream, then mash the potatoes on the fire, having them the consistency of mashed potatoes; rub the purée through a hair sieve on a dish, then put into a small stewpan; before using add a spoonful of butter.
A French-style potato purée: the potatoes cook in stock rather than water, so nothing of their flavour is poured away. Two details decide whether it works.
- Never use a food processorPotato starch cells burst under high-speed blades and the purée turns to glue within seconds. A ricer, food mill or the hair sieve of the original are the only tools that give the texture intended here.
- Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked pepper, often white or a black-and-white mixture. Crack peppercorns under a pan base rather than using fine ground pepper, which would speckle a white purée.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock: veal or chicken made from unroasted bones, or plain chicken stock. It should be unsalted or lightly salted, since it reduces almost to nothing and will concentrate whatever salt it carries.
- QuantitiesSeven or eight good potatoes is perhaps 2 to 3 lb. A teacup of cream is around 5 fl oz. Whether the pint is the imperial 20 fl oz or the American 16 cannot be settled from the text; either will work, with the smaller measure reducing sooner. Use a floury variety such as russet or Maris Piper.
- Watch the reductionThe pan is covered and the liquid meant to disappear just as the potatoes soften; the original says to boil, and sliced potatoes will take roughly 20 to 25 minutes. Check toward the end; if the stock goes before the potatoes are tender, add a splash more rather than letting the bottom catch.
- Warm the creamCold cream cools the pan. Heat it before it goes in, and keep the purée over low heat while mashing so it stays fluid enough to pass through the sieve.
- The final butterA spoonful of butter beaten in off the heat at the last moment is what gives the gloss. Do it just before serving; reheated purée loses the sheen and needs a little more cream to loosen.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish.
Purée in the nineteenth-century sense meant something forced through a sieve, and the hair sieve named here, a wooden hoop strung with horsehair, was the standard tool before wire mesh became cheap. Cooking the potatoes in broth rather than water and then passing them is the method inherited from French professional kitchens. Potatoes had long since shed their early suspicion in Britain and America and were an everyday vegetable; what marked a dish like this as company food was not the potato but the white broth, the cream and the labour of the sieve. The technique survives essentially unchanged in the modern pomme purée, which differs mainly in using rather more butter.