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Potato Dumpling
Take three parts of dry floury boiled potatoes, and beat them till they are quite smooth. Put with them one part of wheaten flour, a little salt, and as much milk as is wanted to make a tolerable firm paste. Pour the mixture into a buttered basin, or tie it in a floured cloth, and boil until it is firm and light. Serve either with brown gravy, melted butter, cooked apples, stewed prunes, jam, treacle, or sweet sauce. This preparation of food, though not much known in England, forms a daily meal of poor artisans and others in North Germany, with whom meat is a very unusual luxury. It is cheap, simple, and wholesome.
A cloth- or basin-boiled potato pudding of the plainest kind, and one that depends almost entirely on the dryness of the potato. Everything else is adjustable.
- The hinge: dry potatoesWaxy or watery potatoes will force you to add more flour, and the dumpling turns heavy and gluey. Use a floury variety (russet, Maris Piper, King Edward), boil or steam them in their skins, then peel and dry them briefly in the pan over low heat before mashing.
- "Three parts to one part"The original does not say whether by weight or volume, and the two readings are not equivalent: flour is much lighter than mashed potato, so measuring by volume gives considerably less flour by weight and a slacker paste. Reading it by weight, as a starting point, 600 g mashed potato to 200 g flour with about 60-100 ml milk. Add the milk a spoonful at a time and stop when the paste just holds together.
- Beat them smooth, but not too longA ricer or masher is right. A food processor develops the potato starch and produces a wallpaper-paste texture that no amount of flour will rescue.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. In a buttered pudding basin, covered with pleated paper and foil and steamed, a 1 kg mixture needs about 1 1/2 hours; tied in a floured cloth and boiled it wants 45 minutes to an hour. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the surface is dry rather than pasty.
- The pudding clothScald a clean cotton or linen cloth, wring it out, spread it and dust it generously with flour before filling. The flour sets into a skin that keeps water out. Tie loosely enough for a little expansion and keep the water at a steady boil, topping up with boiling water so the pot never goes off the boil.
- TreacleIn a British book of this period "treacle" most often means the dark refinery syrup rather than a pale one; golden syrup is a milder substitute if the black kind is too assertive alongside potato.
- Yield and servingThe quantity above serves four to six. Sliced, it is much better fried in butter the next day.
Cassell's is unusually frank here about why the dish appears at all: it is included as an economy, not as a delicacy, and the note about North German artisans for whom "meat is a very unusual luxury" tells you the book's editors were writing for readers who might need to feed a household on very little. Boiled potato dough of this sort belongs to a broad central and northern European family, the German Kartoffelkloss and its many regional cousins, in which cooked potato and a little flour stand in for the wheat that a bread dumpling would demand. The entry records only that the dish is "not much known in England"; the list of accompaniments offered here, running from brown gravy through stewed prunes to jam and treacle, shows a dish that had not yet been assigned to either the savoury or the sweet side of the meal.