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Potato Pudding
One pint boiled milk, one cup flour, one-half spoon melted butter, two eggs beaten separately, very light, one table spoon sugar, three small potatoes boiled and mashed, with a little salt; mix well together and bake one hour. Wine or brandy sauce.
A plain baked pudding of the old batter-and-custard family, sweetened almost entirely by the sauce poured over it at table. The original gives no oven heat and no dish size, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureAn hour's bake for a batter pudding of this kind means a moderate oven, about 350F. Higher and the egg curdles at the edges before the centre sets.
- Dish and depthUse a buttered 1 1/2-quart baking dish; the mixture should sit no more than about two inches deep. In a deeper vessel the hour will not be enough.
- "One-half spoon" of butterGenuinely ambiguous — the recipe names a tablespoon later for the sugar, so the plain "spoon" here may be either a tea- or tablespoon. Half a tablespoon is the safer reading in a pudding this lean.
- Mixing the flour and hot milkWhisk the cup of flour to a smooth paste with a little of the milk cold, then add the rest of the pint boiling. Tipping flour straight into boiled milk gives lumps that no amount of beating will clear.
- The potatoesThree small boiled potatoes is roughly 8 oz, about a cup mashed. Use a floury variety such as russet, mash or rice them while hot, and get them absolutely smooth before they meet the batter — cold mash goes gluey and will not disperse.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis is the hinge. The whites are the only lift in the pudding, so beat them to soft peaks and fold them in last, after the milk mixture has cooled to lukewarm. Fold into anything hotter and they collapse.
- SweetnessOne tablespoon of sugar in a pint of milk is barely sweet by modern taste, and deliberately so: the wine or brandy sauce is the sweet element. If you serve it without a sauce, expect something closer to a side dish than a dessert.
- Doneness and servingIt is done when the centre is set and a knife comes out clean, usually right at the hour. It puffs and then sinks as it cools, so send it to the table promptly. Serves four to six.
Potato pudding belongs to a large nineteenth-century family of baked puddings built on a starch, milk and eggs — rice, bread, tapioca, cornstarch, sago and potato all took their turn — and it survived in American cookbooks partly because it used up what was already in the kitchen. The potato here does not sweeten or flavour much; it lightens and stretches, standing in for a portion of flour in the way cooks of the period also used it in bread and cake. That the recipe leaves the sweetening to a wine or brandy sauce is characteristic of the era's dessert course, where a hot spirituous sauce often carried the sweetness and the pudding served as its vehicle. The compressed style — no oven heat, no dish size — is common in household cookery of the later 1800s, where such things were assumed knowledge rather than instructions worth writing down.