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Potato Pie (Common-sized tea-cup of grated)
A common-sized tea-cup of grated raw potato, a quart sweet milk; let milk boil and stir in grated potato; when cool add two or three eggs well beaten, sugar and nutmeg to taste; bake without upper crust; eat the day it is baked. This recipe is for two pies. -Miss Sarah Thomson, Delaware.
This is a baked custard pie thickened with potato starch rather than flour or cornstarch, and the original assumes you know how a custard behaves. Two points decide whether it works: cooking the grated potato into the milk until it visibly thickens, and letting that mixture cool before the eggs go in.
- Temper, or scrambleEggs stirred into hot milk will curdle. Let the thickened potato-milk drop to lukewarm, or whisk a ladleful into the beaten eggs first and return it to the pan.
- The teacupA "common-sized tea-cup" is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup to 1 cup, though the measure was never standardised. Grated raw potato packs unevenly; somewhere in the region of 3 to 5 ounces of peeled potato is a sound reading for a quart of milk.
- Grate straight into the panRaw potato greys within minutes of contact with air. Grate it directly over the pan of milk that is already at a simmer, and stir as you go.
- Cook the starch outThe milk should be held at a bare simmer for several minutes after the potato goes in, until it coats a spoon and loses the raw, chalky taste. Undercooked potato starch reads as gluey in the finished pie.
- Sugar and nutmeg "to taste"For two pies, 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar and a generous quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg is a reasonable reading. Taste the cooled base before the eggs go in; it should be a shade sweeter than you want the baked pie to be. A pinch of salt is not called for in the original.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, only "bake." A moderate oven, about 325 to 350F, suits a custard, which weeps and cracks at higher heat. Figure roughly 40 to 50 minutes for a 9-inch pie, pulled when the outer two inches are set and the centre still shivers.
- Par-bake the shellsA wet custard poured into raw pastry gives a soft base. Blind-bake the bottom crusts until dry and pale, then fill. There is no top crust, as the recipe says.
- Yield and keepingTwo pies; the original does not give their size, so 9-inch is a modern assumption. "Eat the day it is baked" reflects a kitchen without refrigeration and is also good custard advice; refrigerate any that survives the day and finish it within two.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) was assembled from contributions sent in by named women across Ohio and neighboring states, which is why this pie carries Miss Sarah Thomson's name and her town. Potato pie of this kind is a thrift custard: the grated raw potato supplies starch that binds a quart of milk into a sliceable filling, doing the work that cornstarch or a spoonful of flour would do in a later recipe, and stretching eggs that were seasonal and not always cheap. The same logic produced the long American family of substitute pies made from crackers, vinegar, or green tomatoes. It is worth noting this is not the sweet-potato pie of the Southern table but a white-potato dessert, closer in spirit to the potato and carrot puddings that ran through English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and the nutmeg is the standard period finish for anything milk-and-egg based.