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Potato Pie (Boil either Irish or sweet)
Boil either Irish or sweet potatoes until well done, mash and rub through a sieve; to a pint of pulp, add three pints sweet milk, table-spoon melted butter, tea-cup sugar, three eggs, pinch of salt, and nutmeg or lemon to flavor. Use rich paste for under crust. - Mrs. R. C. Carson, Harrisburg.
A potato custard pie in the old style, closer to a pumpkin pie in method than to anything savory. The original assumes you know how to handle a custard filling, so the numbers matter more than the steps.
- Yield is much larger than one pieA pint of pulp plus three pints of milk and three eggs makes roughly two quarts of filling — enough for two or three 9-inch pies, not one. Cut the quantities to a third or a half for a single pie, and expect a shallow, delicate custard rather than a dense one.
- Irish potatoesThat simply means ordinary white potatoes, as distinct from sweet. A dry, mealy russet mashes and sieves best; waxy potatoes turn gluey when worked.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, i.e. unsoured. The term is there to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which also appear in these books, often in soda-raised batters.
- Tea-cupNot a modern measuring cup. Period tea-cups run somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup; start at about 3/4 cup sugar for the full batch and adjust to taste.
- Rub through a sieveThis is the hinge. Mashing alone leaves lumps and threads that never disappear in a custard; pressing the hot pulp through a sieve or food mill gives the smooth body the filling depends on. Do it while the potato is hot.
- Rich pasteA short, fat-rich pastry (period 'rich paste' may use butter, lard or both). The original gives no oven instruction; because the filling is wet, a modern approach is to chill the lined shell hard, start hot for the first 15 minutes, then drop the heat to finish.
- Knowing when it is doneThe original gives no time. Bake until the edges are set and the center still trembles — about 170-175F on a thermometer. A fully firm center in the oven means an overcooked, weeping custard once it cools.
- FlavoringNutmeg is best freshly grated; 'lemon' here means either grated zest or lemon extract, which was commercially available in this period. The recipe's 'or' suggests one or the other, not both.
Sweet potato pie and its white-potato cousin are generally traced to the English sweetened root and vegetable puddings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which treated carrot, parsnip, potato and squash more or less interchangeably as the base for a sugared, spiced custard baked in pastry. By the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in Minneapolis in 1877, the form had settled into the pattern seen here: sieved pulp, milk, eggs, sugar, nutmeg, one crust and no top. That the recipe offers Irish or sweet potatoes without preference is often said to reflect the period's economy — on that reading the pie was a way of turning a cheap, abundant staple into a dessert, and whichever kind of potato was in the cellar would do. The attribution to Mrs. R. C. Carson of Harrisburg is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named women across the Midwest and East and printed their credits alongside their recipes.