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Potato Pudding, Baked
Rub a pound of boiled potatoes through a wire sieve. Mix with them a pinch of salt, two ounces of butter, melted, two egg yolks, sugar to taste, the juice and grated rind of a lemon, and last the whisked whites of eggs. Bake in a buttered dish for half an hour. Serve hot.
A Victorian sweet potato pudding — starchy, lemon-scented, lightened with beaten whites. The instructions omit both oven temperature and sugar quantity, so a little judgement is needed.
- Sieve while hotThe hinge of the dish. Boiled potatoes push through a sieve cleanly only while steaming hot; once cool they turn gluey and the pudding becomes heavy. A ricer or food mill does the same work faster. Do not use a food processor, which develops the starch into paste.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. Around 350F (175C) will set a shallow buttered dish in the half-hour stated. Deeper dishes need longer; the centre should be just firm and the top lightly browned.
- Potato choiceUse a floury, mealy variety — Russet, King Edward, Maris Piper. Waxy new potatoes will not sieve to the dry fluff the recipe depends on and give a dense, damp result.
- The eggsTwo yolks are specified but the whites are left uncounted; two is the sensible reading. Fold them in loosely at the very end and get the pudding into the oven at once, since the rise is entirely mechanical — there is no chemical raising agent here.
- Sugar to tasteFor a pound of potatoes, 2 to 3 oz (about 1/4 to 1/3 cup) gives a pudding sweet enough to serve as a dessert without swamping the lemon. Less than that and it reads as a savoury side.
- Butter and lemonTwo ounces is half a stick, melted and stirred in warm so it disperses rather than seizing. Grate the zest before juicing, and take only the yellow, not the bitter white pith.
- Yield and servingA pound of potatoes fills roughly a 1-quart dish and serves about four. Serve hot, as directed; it sinks and stiffens as it cools. Cream or a spoonful of jam suits it.
Sweet puddings built on sieved potato were a fixture of British and Irish cookery from the eighteenth century onward. The logic is thrift: a cheap, filling starch is enriched with butter and eggs and turned into a dessert, with lemon rind doing the aromatic work that a costlier household might have got from brandy or candied peel. Potato in sweet dishes now reads as odd to most British cooks, though the habit survives in the sweet potato puddings of the American South. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, issued in numerous editions from the 1870s through the early twentieth century, was a compendium rather than a single author's book, and entries like this one are written in the compressed shorthand of a kitchen reference — heat, quantity and yield all assumed known to whoever was standing at the range.