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Erin Potatoes
Remove seeds and veins and parboil one mild green pepper eight minutes. Chop fine, add to Mashed Potatoes.
A two-line garnish recipe that assumes you already have the book's Mashed Potatoes on the stove. The only real technique here is taming the pepper before it goes in.
- The hinge: parboil, then drain wellEight minutes in boiling water softens the pepper and takes the raw edge off, but it also loads it with water. Drain and pat dry before chopping, or the potatoes will loosen and turn grey-green rather than flecked.
- "One mild green pepper"A green bell pepper, roughly 5-6 oz. Do not substitute a poblano or an Anaheim looking for character; the dish is built on colour, not heat.
- Chop fine means fineAn eighth-inch dice or smaller. Larger pieces read as stewed pepper in the middle of the potato instead of the even green speckle the name is going for.
- Quantity of potatoThe original gives none. One pepper suits about 2 lb of potatoes, serving six; much more and the effect disappears entirely.
- Fold in at the endBeat the potatoes smooth with butter, cream and seasoning first, then fold the pepper through off the heat. Beating after the pepper is in breaks the dice down and muddies the colour.
- An alternative to boilingSweating the diced pepper in butter over low heat for the same eight minutes gets you softness without the waterlogging, though it gives a rounder, less fresh flavour than the original intends.
Erin is the poetic name for Ireland, and the recipe reads as a pun: green flecks in a potato dish. American cookbooks of this period often carried such one-line variations, in which a base preparation such as mashed potatoes was renamed by the addition of a single ingredient. That habit suits 52 Sunday Dinners, which sets out a year of complete meals with the components cross-referenced rather than repeated. Sweet peppers were becoming more widely available outside the summer garden by the 1910s, as produce was shipped north by rail to cities like Chicago, where the book was published.