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Potato Pudding
Mash a pound of boiled potatoes, dry and floury, and make a batter by mixing with them an ounce of clarified butter, three well-beaten eggs, and two table-spoonfuls of milk, together with a little salt and pepper. Butter a baking-dish rather thickly, pour half the batter into it, and lay upon this three-quarters of a pound of underdone beef or mutton, cut into neat slices, and quite free from fat, skin, and gristle. Pour the rest of the batter over the meat, and bake the pudding in a moderate oven. Serve very hot, and send good brown sauce to table in a tureen. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A Victorian way with Sunday's leftover joint: mashed potato standing in for suet batter, with cold roast beef or mutton sealed inside. The pudding lives or dies on the potatoes being dry.
- Dry, floury potatoesThe recipe specifies dry and floury for a reason — a waxy or waterlogged mash will not set and the pudding turns to paste. Use a floury variety (Russet, Maris Piper, King Edward), boil or steam whole in the skin, peel hot, and let the steam drive off before mashing.
- A moderate oven350F/175C. An hour at that heat sets the egg and browns the top without drying the meat that is already cooked.
- Clarified butterAn ounce is about 2 tablespoons. Ordinary melted butter works; clarifying was partly a keeping measure in a period without reliable refrigeration.
- "Underdone" meatThis means rare to medium-rare roast beef or mutton. The recipe does not say so, but a dish of this kind was generally a way of using meat already cooked, sliced cold. It finishes cooking in the pudding. Slices from a joint cooked well through are likely to come out dry after an hour in the oven.
- The batter is stiffThe batter is thick -- A pound of mash, three eggs and two tablespoons of milk gives a heavy mixture. The recipe calls it a batter and says to pour it, but expect something closer to spreadable; if it will not pour, spread the first half over the base of the dish and pat the top layer over the meat.
- Brown sauceNot the bottled condiment. A Victorian brown sauce is a meat-stock gravy thickened with browned roux — the pudding itself is dry-ish and the sauce is not optional.
- Dish and yieldA 1 to 1.5 quart baking dish, buttered heavily as directed so the potato releases. Serves two or three as written; the quantities double cleanly.
- The cost line1s. 3d. is the original's estimate in pre-decimal British currency, of use now only as a period marker.
Cassell's belonged to the great age of the leftover, when a large joint was roasted for Sunday and the cook was expected to carry it through the week without it ever appearing twice in the same guise. Potato pudding of this kind sits between two older English forms: the batter pudding baked under or around meat, of which Yorkshire pudding is the survivor, and the potato-crusted pies that spread through British kitchens in the nineteenth century as the potato became the cheap staple of the urban household. The instruction that the meat be "quite free from fat, skin, and gristle" is often read as characteristic of the book's audience — a middle-class kitchen, one imagines, with a servant to do the trimming, and a table where visible evidence of reheating was to be avoided — though this is inference rather than something the book states. The named cost and the "sufficient for" line appear on nearly every entry in Cassell's, part of a Victorian publishing habit of presenting cookery as household accounting as much as craft.