Peel and boil potatoes in salted water until tender; drain and mash with a lump of butter. Put in a well-buttered baking-dish a layer of the potatoes and a layer of fried bread-crumbs until dish is full. Moisten with beaten eggs, well seasoned with salt and pepper, and 3 tablespoonfuls of milk. Put in the oven to brown. Serve with boiled fish.
A layered potato and crumb pudding with no quantities and no oven temperature, which is typical of the terse one-paragraph format this book used for all 365 entries. The proportions are forgiving, but the egg binding is not.
- Working quantitiesFor a 1½-quart dish, 2 lb floury potatoes, 3 tablespoons butter, about 1 cup fried crumbs, 2 eggs and the 3 tablespoons milk give the right balance. More than two eggs turns it into a savoury custard rather than a potato dish.
- Oven temperatureThe book only says "to brown." Use 375-400F for 25-30 minutes, until the top is set and coloured and the centre reads 160F. The egg mixture is raw when it goes in, so browning alone is not the doneness test.
- Fried bread-crumbsThese mean coarse fresh crumbs from a stale loaf, fried in butter until crisp and golden before layering, not dry packaged crumbs. Fry them separately and let them cool slightly, or they will absorb moisture from the potato and go soft.
- Getting the egg through the layers"Moisten with beaten eggs" works badly if poured on at the end, since it sits on top and sets as a skin. Beat the eggs with the milk, salt and pepper and spoon a little over each potato layer as you build the dish.
- Potato choiceRussets or another dry, mealy variety mash light and absorb the butter. Waxy potatoes give a gluey layer that will not take the egg evenly.
- SeasoningSalt the boiling water generously and season the mash itself as well as the egg mixture. Potato and bread together mute salt.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as the starch alongside boiled fish, which is all the recipe specifies; cod, haddock or hake with a butter or parsley sauce would suit. It reheats well, covered, at 325F.
Potatoes layered or bound with dairy and browned in the oven are the everyday register of Irish cooking rather than a named dish, and this entry sits in a family that includes champ, colcannon and the various potato cakes made from the previous day's mash. The pairing with boiled fish is the giveaway to its context: a Friday or Lenten dinner, meatless but substantial, in a period when abstinence from meat on Fridays was ordinary practice in Irish and Irish-American households. The book itself belongs to a genre often associated with the turn of the twentieth century, the calendar cookbook, which assigned one dish to each day of the year and hung a national label on it "14e the labels are loose, and "Irish" here means little more than "potatoes, plainly handled." Fried breadcrumbs serve as a layering element here, using up stale bread and adding crispness where no pastry or cheese was in the budget.