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Potato Cottage Pudding
Take half a pound of boiled potatoes, dry and floury. Beat until they are quite smooth, and add a pinch of salt, the grated rind and strained juice of a small lemon, two table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, two ounces of clarified butter or good beef dripping, and two well-beaten eggs. Beat the mixture thoroughly, turn it into a buttered dish, and bake in a well-heated oven. The flavour of the pudding may be varied by the addition of a few washed and dried currants, or an ounce of blanched and pounded almonds, or a glassful of sherry. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A thrifty baked potato pudding of the type Victorian cookery books used to stretch eggs and sugar. It works, but only if the potatoes are handled correctly.
- The hinge: dry, floury potatoesWaxy potatoes make a gluey pudding no amount of beating will fix. Use russets, King Edward or Maris Piper, boiled or better yet baked, then riced or sieved while still hot so the starch stays fluffy rather than turning to paste.
- Half a pound of potatoesThat is 8 oz / 225 g of cooked potato, weighed after boiling and peeling — roughly two medium potatoes raw.
- "A well-heated oven"For a 45-minute egg-set pudding, read this as roughly 375-400°F / 190-200°C. Higher and the outside sets and browns before the centre has cooked through.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" was an unrefined soft sugar. Light brown or golden caster sugar is the closest match; two tablespoons is about 1 oz / 30 g, which makes this only faintly sweet by modern standards.
- Clarified butter or drippingTwo ounces (55 g) of melted butter works fine, and clarifying is unnecessary here since it is beaten into a batter rather than kept for storage. Beef dripping gives a savoury edge that suits the currant version better than the lemon-and-sherry one.
- Pounded almonds and "a glassful"An ounce of blanched pounded almonds is 30 g of ground almonds. "A glassful" of sherry in this period is usually taken as a wineglassful, about 2 fl oz (60 ml); add it and the mixture will be loose, so allow a little longer in the oven.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 1-pint (600 ml) pie dish is about right. The recipe gives it as sufficient for four or five, best warm with cream or a thin custard, since it is dense and dries out once cold.
Potato puddings were a standard of English cookery from the eighteenth century onward — Hannah Glasse and later writers give versions — and they survived because potato is cheap bulk that carries butter, sugar, eggs and lemon without tasting of much itself. The "cottage" in the name most likely signals plain and cheap, the same sense found in cottage pie and cottage loaf, rather than any particular place; that usage is older than the Victorian period. The "probable cost" line, a feature of Victorian household cookery dictionaries of this kind, is the tell: at 8d for four or five people this was aimed at households counting pennies, and the three suggested variations — currants, almonds, sherry — let the same base pudding be dressed up or left plain depending on what the cupboard held and who was eating.