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POTATO PUDDING (another way) (Take a quarter of a pound)
Take a quarter of a pound of freshly-boiled potatoes, dry and floury. Beat them till quite smooth, then mix with them half a pound of butter, melted, a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, and a quarter of a pound of picked and dried currants. When these ingredients are thoroughly mixed, add six well-beaten eggs and a glass of wine, or a table-spoonful of brandy. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish or mould, and either bake or boil it. The baked pudding is the better of the two. Time, half an hour or more. Probable cost, 1s. 6d., exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A rich sweet pudding in the eighteenth-century manner, where potato does the work later given to breadcrumbs or ground almonds. The proportions look startling — twice as much butter as potato — but they are as printed.
- Weights in modern termsA quarter of a pound is 4 oz (115 g); half a pound is 8 oz (225 g). So: 4 oz potato, 8 oz melted butter, 4 oz sugar, 4 oz currants, six eggs.
- The hinge: mash while hot, mix while warmThe potato must be beaten smooth the moment it is drained, before it cools and turns gluey. Pass it through a sieve or ricer rather than a food processor, which develops starch and gives a rubbery pudding.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a cone and broken or crushed for use. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct replacement.
- "A glass of wine"Conventionally a wine-glass, taken as roughly 2 fl oz (about 60 ml); sherry or Madeira suits the pudding. The alternative tablespoon of brandy is far less liquid, so the batter will be correspondingly stiffer.
- Picked and dried currantsNineteenth-century dried fruit arrived gritty and full of stalks, hence the picking over and drying in a cloth. Modern currants need only a rinse if they seem dusty.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; a moderate oven, around 350F (180C), suits it. Half an hour (the time given) suits a shallow buttered dish; a deep mould will want 45 minutes to an hour, and is done when the centre is just set and no longer liquid.
- If you boil it insteadA boiled version goes into a well-buttered mould, covered tightly with buttered paper and a floured cloth, and sits in gently simmering water — never a rolling boil, which will curdle a mixture this heavy in egg and butter. The recipe is right that baking gives the better result.
- Butter separationWith eight ounces of butter to four of potato, some fat may weep out as it bakes. Beat the melted butter into the potato thoroughly, and add the eggs gradually so the mixture stays emulsified rather than splitting.
- Yield and servingFour or five as written — small portions, given the richness. Serve warm with cream or a wine sauce; it is very good cold and firm, cut in slices.
Sweet potato puddings were a staple of English cookery from the mid-1700s onward, when the potato had become cheap and plentiful and cooks began treating it as a bland, absorbent base for eggs, butter, sugar and dried fruit -- the same logic that produced bread pudding and carrot pudding. Recipes of this type appear in Hannah Glasse and in Eliza Acton, and Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the 1870s. The costing -- 1s. 6d. for a pudding serving five, with the brandy counted separately -- is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for middle-class households keeping an eye on the weekly books.