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Potato Pudding, Sweet
Bake half a dozen large potatoes, and when they are done enough break them open and scoop out the contents with a spoon. Beat them lightly, and with a quarter of a pound of the potato flour put three ounces of clarified butter, half a tea-spoonful of finely-minced lemon-rind, a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, a pinch of salt, three table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar, and three table-spoonfuls of milk or cream. Beat the pudding for five or six minutes, then add separately the yolks and well-whisked whites of three eggs. Butter a plain mould, ornament it with dried fruit or slices of candied peel, pour in the pudding, and bake in a well-heated oven, or steam the pudding if preferred. Turn it out before serving, sift sugar thickly over it, and garnish the dish with jam. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour; to steam, one hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian baked or steamed pudding built on the dry, floury flesh of baked potatoes rather than a batter. It is closer to a hot souffléd sponge than to anything a modern cook would call potato pudding.
- "The potato flour"This does not mean commercial potato starch. The phrase most likely refers to the floury baked pulp just scooped out, of which you weigh a quarter of a pound (about 115 g) — roughly one large baking potato's worth. Why the recipe has you bake half a dozen when so little pulp is called for is not explained in the text.
- Choice of potatoUse a high-starch baking variety such as russet. Waxy potatoes give a heavy, gluey pudding, and the whole point of baking rather than boiling is to drive off water.
- Work while hotThe hinge of the recipe. Scoop, sieve or rice, and beat the pulp with the butter while it is still steaming hot; cooled mashed potato turns pasty when beaten and will not take up the eggs.
- Clarified butterThree ounces is about 85 g. Clarified butter carries no water, which may be why it was specified here; melted unsalted butter works, but keep the milk to the stated three tablespoons.
- Eggs added separatelyBeat in the three yolks one at a time, then fold the whisked whites in last with a light hand. The whites are the only leavening here — overwork them and the pudding bakes dense.
- Oven temperatureCassell's gives no temperatures; a "well-heated oven" corresponds roughly to 375–400F (190–200C) in a modern oven. Butter the mould generously and set it in the middle of the oven for the stated three-quarters of an hour; test with a skewer, which should come out clean.
- If steamingCover the mould tightly with buttered paper and foil and set it in a pan of gently simmering water reaching halfway up the sides, one hour. A steamed pudding stays paler and moister and unmoulds more reliably than a baked one.
- UnmouldingThe dried fruit or candied peel pressed against the buttered mould becomes the top surface. Rest the pudding five minutes before turning out, or the decoration stays behind in the tin.
- YieldFive or six as the book says; a mould of about 1½ pints (850 ml) suits the quantity. The "probable cost, 1s" is a period price note, not an instruction.
Potato puddings, sweet and savoury, run right through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery, and this one belongs to a family of enriched "mould" puddings — potato, rice, semolina, bread — that let a cook stretch three eggs and a little butter into a hot dish for six. The potato is often said to have entered British sweet cookery before it was a staple vegetable, valued for exactly the quality this recipe exploits: baked floury flesh behaves like a starch flour, absorbing fat and egg without going heavy. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a vast late-Victorian compilation issued in parts and then as a single alphabetical volume, is typical in giving a probable cost and a number of persons served for each entry; those two figures would have spoken directly to the middle-class household running a small kitchen on a fixed allowance. The lemon rind and juice, the sifted sugar and the jam garnish are the standard Victorian finish for a plain moulded pudding, doing the work that a sauce would do today.