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POTATO BALLS (economical)
Take one pound of cold boiled potatoes, rub through a wire sieve, put into a stewpan with half an ounce of butter, and a dessert-spoonful of milk; beat over the fire till smooth. Add pepper and salt, the yolk of an egg, and a little chopped parsley. When cold form into balls, brush over with the white of egg, roll in bread-crumbs, and fry in hot fat.
A frugal use for leftover boiled potatoes, and the method still works exactly as written. The only real risk is a wet mixture that bursts in the fat.
- Dry the potatoThe hinge of the dish. A wet, waterlogged mash is harder to shape and more likely to burst; beating the sieved potato over the fire, as the recipe directs, will drive off some moisture as well as smoothing it. Floury potatoes generally shape more easily than waxy ones.
- Sieve or ricerA wire sieve gives the smoothest result, but a potato ricer does the same job in seconds. Never use a food processor, which turns potato to glue.
- QuantitiesA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, so the milk is a token amount to loosen the mash, not to soften it. Half an ounce of butter is roughly 15 g.
- One pound of potatoQuantities -- The recipe gives no yield; a pound of potato will make roughly a dozen or more walnut-sized balls, enough for about four as a side dish.
- Egg white washUsing the white alone, rather than a whole beaten egg, keeps the coating thin and crisp and uses up the white left from the yolk in the mixture. Brush lightly; excess white makes the crumbs slide.
- Chilling"When cold" is doing real work: let the mixture cool completely before shaping, or it will not hold. A further spell in the fridge after shaping and before crumbing is a modern addition, but it helps the balls keep their shape in the fat.
- FryingThe recipe says only "hot fat." In modern terms that means deep fat at about 180C/350F, two to three minutes, until the crumb is deep gold. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are only colouring the crust; a cooler pan lets the balls soak fat and collapse.
Cassell's places this among the plain, thrifty preparations a Victorian kitchen was expected to know: potatoes boiled in quantity for the main meal could reappear the next day in cakes, balls or a hash. The "economical" label in the title marks it out from richer croquette recipes bound with cream or bechamel. The technique is essentially the French croquette method, breadcrumbed and deep-fried, familiar in English domestic cookery by the nineteenth century and here stripped down to what a household could spare. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, issued in the closing decades of the century, arranged its recipes alphabetically for a cook who needed to feed a family rather than impress a table.