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POTATO PUDDING (another way) (Take a few potatoes boil them)
Take a few potatoes, boil them well, and mash them fine with a little milk; then sweeten to taste, and press into a pie-dish. Beat one egg, and lay it on the top of the pudding with a little grated nutmeg. Bake for half an hour.
A thrift pudding written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what it should look like: no quantities, no oven setting, no yield. The points below fill in what the original assumes.
- Oven temperatureCassell's gives no setting, but half an hour for an already-cooked mixture that only needs to set and brown points to a moderate oven, 350F/180C. Anything hotter will colour the egg glaze before the pudding heats through.
- How many potatoes"A few" is genuinely ambiguous. Something in the region of 1 1/2 lb of potatoes, mashed, will fill a pie dish of about 8 inches to a shallow depth that should bake through in half an hour; a much deeper layer will need longer.
- Choose a floury potatoRussets or Maris Piper mash dry and light. Waxy salad potatoes turn gluey when mashed hard and will bake into a dense, damp layer.
- Mash while hot, add milk warmCold milk into cooling potato gives a stiff, pasty mash. Work the potatoes through a ricer or sieve while steaming and beat in warmed milk a little at a time until the mixture is soft but still holds a shape when pressed.
- Sweeten to tasteRoughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar per pound of potato is the useful range for a pudding rather than a side dish. A pinch of salt is not mentioned and is worth adding; unsalted sweetened potato tastes flat.
- The egg is a glaze, not a custardOne beaten egg brushed over the surface sets into a thin golden crust and holds the nutmeg. It is not enough egg to bind the pudding, so do not expect a sliceable custard texture; this is a soft-spooned pudding.
- NutmegGrate it over the egg immediately before baking. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma and will read as dusty rather than fragrant.
- Yield and servingA dish of about 8 inches will serve four to six as a plain pudding. It is better warm than hot, and it stiffens noticeably as it cools.
Sweetened potato puddings belong to a long British tradition of turning a cheap starch into a pudding course, and they sit alongside the bread, rice and sago puddings that fill this part of Victorian cookery books. The "another way" heading indicates a preceding, fuller version of the dish, of the kind eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books gave with butter, eggs, sugar and flavourings. This second version is reduced to potato, milk, sugar, one egg and nutmeg, the sort of thing that could be made from potatoes left from a boiled dinner. Nutmeg as the sole flavouring is characteristic of the period, when it kept well and was reached for in many milk-and-starch puddings.