Home › Puddings and Sauces › Potato Pudding
Potato Pudding
Boil six good mealy potatoes, mash very fine, beat well with the yolks of five eggs, half pound white sugar, quarter pound butter; beat whites of eggs to stiff froth, add the grated rind and juice of one lemon, stir well, and add a little salt and a pint of good milk or cream; bake an hour and a half; reserve some of the whites of eggs, mix with sugar, and ice the top. - Mrs. Ex-Governor Ingersoll, Connecticut.
A sweet mashed-potato pudding in the English manner, lightened with beaten whites and finished with meringue. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. An hour and a half suits a moderate oven, 325-350F; the pudding is set when a knife inserted near the centre comes out clean. Cover loosely with foil if the top colours before the middle firms.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of white sugar is a generous cup, a quarter pound of butter is one stick or half a cup, and a pint is two cups. Six "good mealy potatoes" means roughly 2 lb of russets, boiled and peeled.
- Mash while hotCooked potato turns gluey once it cools and is worked. Put it through a ricer or food mill straight from the pot, then beat in the butter and sugar while everything is still warm so the starch stays light.
- Order of operationsAs written, the lemon and the milk go in with the whipped whites, which will knock the air out. Better to beat the yolks, sugar, butter, lemon and milk into the potato first, then fold in the stiff whites last.
- Dish and yieldA 2 1/2 to 3 quart baking dish, buttered, since the mixture alone comes to roughly two quarts before it rises. It serves eight to ten as a dessert and is best warm rather than hot, when the lemon comes forward.
- The meringue topThe reserved whites beaten with sugar are spread on after baking and need eight to ten minutes back in the oven to set and colour. Whites browned this briefly do not reach a pasteurising temperature, so use pasteurised whites if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Milk or creamWhole milk gives a pudding closer to a souffle; cream makes it dense and rich. Nineteenth-century "good milk" was unhomogenised and unstandardised, and was often richer than today's whole milk.
Sweet puddings built on mashed potato were a familiar part of English cookery by the eighteenth century, and they crossed into American cookbooks with the same pairings intact: butter, sugar, lemon rind and juice, and eggs beaten separately to give lift. The potato here is doing the job flour or breadcrumbs do elsewhere, carrying the eggs and dairy while contributing almost no flavour of its own, which is why the lemon reads so strongly. Buckeye Cookery (published in 1877 and expanded through the 1880s) was assembled largely from contributed receipts, many of them credited to named contributors; the Mrs. Ex-Governor Ingersoll credited here would have been the wife of a Connecticut governor of the 1870s.