Home › The Principles of Cookery › Eggs and Potatoes
Eggs and Potatoes
Boil seven or eight floury potatoes and mash them while quite hot; add one ounce of butter, the yolk of an egg, pepper, and salt, and, if liked, a little pounded onion, and boiled minced parsley. Roll the potatoes into egg-like shape, brush them over with beaten egg, and cover with fine bread-crumbs well seasoned with salt and white pepper. Put them into an oven to brown, or fry in lard or dripping till they are of a fine brown colour; lay them before the fire to drain, if fried, and serve garnished with fried parsley. Time, half an hour to boil potatoes. Probable cost, 1d. to 2d. per pound. Allow one pound for three persons.
A Victorian way with leftover or freshly boiled potato: seasoned mash shaped into ovals, crumbed and browned. The whole thing stands or falls on how dry the mash is.
- Dry the potato firstFloury potatoes (Maris Piper, russet, King Edward) must be drained and returned to the hot pan for a minute or two to steam off before mashing. Wet mash will not hold an egg shape and will burst its crumb coating in the fat.
- Quantity"Seven or eight floury potatoes" is not a fixed weight; the book's own note of one pound for three persons is the more useful guide, which for three or four eaters means a little over a pound of peeled potato, with one ounce of butter and one yolk.
- Mash while hotThe instruction is deliberate. Butter and yolk are absorbed cleanly into hot potato; stirred into cold mash they sit on the surface and the mixture turns gluey.
- "Pounded onion"Onion crushed to a paste in a mortar, essentially raw. Grated onion, or a spoonful softened in butter first, gives the same flavour without the raw bite and the extra moisture.
- Oven heatThe original specifies only "an oven to brown". For browning rather than baking through, a hot oven of about 425F (220C) on a greased tray, turning once, will take colour in roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes.
- Frying fatLard or beef dripping is still the best choice for flavour and browning point; any neutral oil at 350-375F (175-190C) works. Fry a small batch at a time so the fat does not drop in temperature and soak the crumbs.
- Draining"Lay them before the fire to drain" belongs to an open range. A wire rack in a low oven does the same job and keeps the undersides crisp; paper towel alone steams them soft.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs, thoroughly dry, dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop spitting and turn bright and brittle. Wet parsley will spatter violently, so shake it out and blot it first.
- Chilling helpsNot in the original, but shaping the ovals and leaving them in the refrigerator for half an hour before crumbing makes them far easier to handle and much less likely to break up in the pan.
Despite the title, no whole egg appears in the dish: the potatoes are simply moulded to an egg shape and glazed with beaten egg before crumbing, a piece of Victorian table trompe-l'oeil of the same family as mock turtle soup and the various "mock" game dishes. Shaping and crumbing potatoes in this way is often said to have been a domestic economy in British kitchens of the period, though here the potatoes are boiled fresh rather than left over, and the recipe includes the costing (a penny or two a pound) because it was aimed squarely at households counting them. The technique is generally traced to French practice, close to the pommes duchesse and croquettes de pommes de terre that were entering English cookery books through the second half of the nineteenth century, but reduced here to something a plain cook could turn out with a fork, a mortar and a frying pan.