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POTATO PUDDING, WITH HAM, ETC. (a German recipe)
Take some large potatoes, roast them, break them and scoop out the inside; to two quarts of potato add six ounces of butter and the yolks of four eggs; work through a sieve, season with pepper and salt. Butter well a mould and sprinkle it with bread-crumbs or raspings; fill it about two inches deep with potato puree; then put a thin layer of ham, cooked veal, or anything else preferred, which cover with potato; then put a layer of meat again, and so on till the mould is filled. Bake the pudding for an hour, loosen the sides gently with a knife, and turn out carefully that it may not break.
A layered potato and meat pudding baked in a mould, of the sort that turned Sunday leftovers into a dish worth carrying to table. Everything hangs on the dryness of the potato.
- The hinge: dry, floury potato"Roast them" means bake the potatoes whole in their skins until fully soft — not boil them. The original specifies no oven temperature. Baking drives off water, and a wet puree will slump and fall apart when you turn the mould out. Scoop and sieve the flesh while it is still hot.
- Quantity of potatoTwo quarts of scooped potato is a large pudding: reckon on roughly 4 to 5 lb of baking potatoes, depending on how loosely the flesh is packed. It will serve eight or so as a main course. Halve the whole recipe for a family of four.
- Butter and yolksSix ounces is 1 1/2 sticks. Four yolks are what bind the puree; there is no flour and no whipped white here, so the pudding sets rather than rises.
- RaspingsDried, hard-baked bread crusts grated to a coarse powder — the Victorian standby for lining moulds. Plain dry breadcrumbs do the same job, and they matter: a well-buttered, well-crumbed mould is the difference between a clean turn-out and a wreck.
- Passing through a sieveWork the hot flesh through a drum sieve or use a ricer or food mill. A food processor turns potato gluey; avoid it.
- The meat must already be cookedHam, cold roast veal, chicken or tongue, sliced thin. Nothing in an hour's bake inside a sealed mass of potato will reliably cook raw meat through, so use cooked meat only, and slice it thin enough that the layers do not act as a cleavage plane.
- Oven and mouldThe original gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits the hour's bake, in a plain charlotte mould, deep cake tin or pudding basin. Cover loosely with foil if the top colours too fast.
- Turning outLet it stand 10 minutes off the heat before loosening the sides; it firms as it cools slightly and is far less likely to break. Invert onto a warmed dish in one decisive movement.
Cassell's marks this as German, and it belongs to the family of dishes a German cook would call Kartoffelauflauf or Kartoffelpudding — potato worked with butter and yolks, layered with whatever cooked meat the larder held, and baked in a mould so it could be turned out whole. The moulded savoury pudding was the great nineteenth-century answer to the problem of leftovers: a slice of it looks composed and deliberate in a way that a plate of cold ham does not. Its appearance in a British dictionary of cookery of the 1870s and 80s also reflects how far the potato had travelled in respectability, from famine food and fodder to the base of a dish worth borrowing from a foreign kitchen. Note too the assumption that a household has cold cooked veal or ham sitting about — a joint roasted on Sunday was expected to reappear, disguised, for several days after.