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GARNISH, POTATOES FRIED FOR (another way)
Mash some boiled potatoes with a little butter and milk. Shape them into balls, and proceed as in the last recipe. Time, ten minutes. Probable cost, 2d. per pound. Sufficient, half a pound for each person.
A garnish recipe from the era when a joint of meat arrived at table ringed with something crisp. The instruction "proceed as in the last recipe" means egg-and-breadcrumb the balls and fry them in deep fat until golden.
- The missing half of the methodCassell's assumes you have just read the preceding entry, which in a fried-potato-garnish sequence of this kind would almost certainly have the shaped potato rolled in beaten egg, then in fine breadcrumbs, and lowered into hot fat. Without a crumb coat the balls are liable to slump and break up in the pan.
- Make the mash dryThis is the hinge. Boiled potatoes mashed with generous milk will not hold a ball in hot fat. Use a floury potato, dry it off over low heat after draining, and add only enough butter and milk to bind — the mixture should be stiff enough to keep a shape when squeezed.
- Chill before fryingThe original gives no resting time, but balls that have sat in the fridge for half an hour crumb more cleanly and are far less likely to burst. A cool Victorian larder may have had something of the same effect.
- Fat temperature"Time, ten minutes" is probably not ten minutes in the fat; at 350-375F the balls colour in two to three minutes, and the potato inside is already cooked, so you are only crisping the crust.
- SizeNo dimension is given. Walnut-sized, about 1½ inches, fries evenly and looks right around a joint; anything larger takes on fat before it browns.
- The quantities"2d. per pound" is twopence in pre-decimal currency, a price note for the household accounts rather than a measurement. Half a pound per person is a Victorian garnish portion; a quarter of that is plenty alongside a modern main course.
- SeasoningNone is specified in this entry. Salt the mash properly and add white pepper and a grating of nutmeg — unseasoned potato under a fried crust tastes of very little.
Fried potato garnishes filled a specific slot in the Victorian dinner service: the roast or the braise came to table on a dish, and the space around it had to be occupied by something that looked deliberate. Croquette-style potato balls, egged and crumbed and dropped in deep fat, were the workhorse solution, cheap enough that Cassell's could quote the cost by the pound and still call half a pound per head reasonable. The New Dictionary of Cookery, arranged alphabetically, has the habit of writing "proceed as in the last recipe," so that a cook looking up one variation is pointed to its neighbours. The technique is one member of the potato croquette family, already well established by this date, and the pommes dauphine and duchesse of French professional kitchens sit on the same shelf: cooked potato, enriched, shaped, and given a crust it cannot grow on its own.