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Cottage Potato Pudding
Peel and boil two pounds of potatoes. Mash them, and beat them to a smooth paste, with a breakfast-cupful of milk, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and two well-beaten eggs. Add a handful of stoned and picked raisins, put the mixture into a well-greased pie-dish, and bake it for nearly an hour. If the milk is left out, and a quarter of a pound of butter substituted, it will make a nice cake. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost: pudding, 5d.; cake, 9d.
A plain Victorian pudding built on leftover-style boiled potatoes, sweetened and enriched enough to pass as dessert. Almost nothing needs changing beyond the units and the oven.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly half an imperial pint, about 10 fl oz or 11/4 US cups. Add it gradually: floury potatoes drink more than waxy ones, and you want a thick batter that just falls from the spoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the coal range had no thermostat or dependable gauge, and this recipe offers no word-description of the heat either. Bake at 350F (180C) for the stated hour, until set and lightly browned on top.
- Choose the potatoA floury variety (Maris Piper, King Edward, russet) mashes to the smooth paste the recipe asks for. Waxy potatoes turn gluey when beaten hard and will give a heavy, sticky pudding.
- Drain and dryTwo pounds of boiled potato carries a lot of water. Drain well and let the pan steam dry over low heat for a minute before mashing, or the custard will be loose.
- Stoned and picked raisinsNineteenth-century dried fruit came with stems and seeds still in it, hence the instruction. Modern seedless raisins need only a quick rinse; a handful is about 2-3 oz.
- Pie-dishA Victorian pie-dish is an oval or round earthenware baking dish, not a pastry case. Use a buttered 1.5- to 2-quart baking dish; nothing is lined or covered.
- The cake variationSwapping the milk for 4 oz of butter gives a much stiffer mixture that bakes into a dense, sliceable cake rather than a spoonable pudding. It will want the same hour, and it is better cold than hot.
- ServingSix portions, as stated. Serve warm from the dish with cream or a spoonful of jam; there is very little sugar by modern standards.
Potato puddings appear all through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery, and the recipe's formulae \