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Mashed Potatoes
Pare and boil till done, drain, and mash in the kettle until perfectly smooth; add milk or cream, and butter and salt; beat like cake with a large spoon, and the more they are beaten the nicer they become. Put in a dish, smooth, place a lump of butter in the center, sprinkle with pepper; or add one or two eggs well-beaten, pepper, mix thoroughly, put in baking dish, dip a knife in sweet milk, smooth over, wetting every part with milk, and place in a hot oven twenty minutes. To warm over mashed potatoes, season with salt and butter, and a little cream or milk, place in a buttered piepan, smoothing and shaping the top handsomely, and making checks with a knife; brown in a stove or range oven; place tin on a second dish and serve on it. Or, add a little cream or milk to cold mashed potatoes, press evenly in a basin, set away, and in the morning slice and fry.
Three recipes in one entry: plain mashed potatoes, a baked potato puff bound with egg, and two ways of using the leftovers. No quantities are given anywhere, which was normal for a staple this familiar.
- QuantitiesReckon on 1/3 to 1/2 lb potatoes per person, roughly 1/2 cup warm milk or cream and 2-3 tablespoons butter per 2 lb of potatoes. Add the liquid in stages; the amount depends entirely on how starchy the potatoes are.
- "Sweet milk"Nineteenth-century shorthand for fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. It is not sweetened.
- "A hot oven"For the baked version, 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to set the egg and colour the surface.
- Mash in the kettleThe instruction to mash in the cooking pot is sound: it keeps the potatoes hot, and hot potatoes absorb butter and milk without going stiff. Return the drained potatoes to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to steam off surface water first.
- On beating them "like cake"This holds for hand work with a masher or wooden spoon on floury potatoes such as russets. It does not hold for a food processor or stick blender, which ruptures the starch cells and turns the mash to glue in seconds. Waxy salad potatoes are far more likely to turn gummy under this much beating, even by hand.
- Warming overThe recipe gives no heat or time for this one, only 'brown in a stove or range oven'; a hot oven of around 400F for 20-30 minutes will brown the checked top. Serving the tin on a second dish is presumably to keep the hot pan off the table.
- The fried versionChill the pressed potato thoroughly, overnight as written, or it will not slice cleanly. Fry in butter or dripping over moderate heat and leave the slices alone until a crust forms.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in 1877 as a compilation of contributions from housekeepers, and this entry shows the compiler's method plainly: rather than three separate headings, three ways with the same vegetable are run together into one paragraph. Potatoes had by then been an American staple for the better part of a century, cheap and stored by the bushel in a cellar, which is why the recipe assumes you know how many to use and spends its words instead on texture and on what to do with what is left. The instruction to smooth the top with a milk-dipped knife and score it in checks shows an attention to how the dish would look when it reached the table.