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POTATO PUDDINGS (Count Rumford's recipes)
1. Mix together twelve ounces of boiled mashed potatoes, one ounce of suet, one ounce (a sixteenth of a pint) of milk, and one ounce of cheese. The suet and cheese to be melted, or chopped as fine as possible. Add as much hot water as will convert the whole into a tolerably stiff mass; then bake it for a short time in an earthen dish, either in front of the fire or in an oven. 2. Twelve ounces of mashed potatoes, one ounce of milk, and one ounce of suet, with salt. Mix and bake as before. 3. Twelve ounces of mashed potatoes, one ounce of red herring chopped fine or bruised in a mortar. Mix and bake. 4. Twelve ounces of mashed potatoes, one ounce of suet, and one ounce of hung beef grated or chopped fine. Mix and bake.
Four variations on the same austere formula: twelve ounces of mashed potato bound with an ounce or two of something rich or salty, baked until set. They are exercises in nutrition per penny rather than dishes with much culinary ambition, but they work if you treat them as potato cakes and season them properly.
- The proportions are by weightTwelve ounces of cooked mashed potato is roughly 1 1/2 cups, from about 1 lb of raw potatoes. Everything else is measured in single ounces, so a kitchen scale is more use here than cups.
- An ounce of milkThe gloss "a sixteenth of a pint" implies a pint of sixteen ounces rather than the twenty-ounce imperial pint, so about 2 tablespoons. It is a moistening agent, not a liquid component.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in packets in the UK and available from butchers elsewhere. "Melted" here means rendered and stirred in warm; chopped fine is the alternative. Butter or beef dripping stands in without complaint.
- Red herringNot a figure of speech but a whole herring heavily salted and cold-smoked until it turns rust-coloured and stiff. Nothing on a modern fish counter matches it; kippers are far milder and wetter. An anchovy fillet or two gives a comparable salt-and-fish hit in the same proportion.
- Hung beefSalt-cured, air-dried beef, grated over the dish like a hard cheese. Bresaola or good biltong is the closest surviving equivalent.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; oven thermometers were not in ordinary domestic use. A hot oven, around 400F for 20 to 30 minutes, until the top is set and browning, suits the recipe's "short time". "In front of the fire" means in a Dutch oven or reflector placed on the hearth, and needs turning.
- SaltOnly version 2 mentions it, but versions 1 and 3 carry their salt in the cheese and the cured fish. Version 4 needs seasoning judged against the saltiness of the dried beef.
- YieldEach version makes about a pound of mixture. For a modern table, treat one batch as a side dish for two and expect it to want pepper, a little mustard, or an egg to lighten it.
Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753-1814), was an American-born physicist who ended up reorganising the Bavarian army and, with it, the feeding of Munich's poor. His work on soup kitchens and workhouse diets in the 1790s was published as part of his Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, and it made him one of the period's most quoted authorities on cheap institutional cookery; the Rumford stove came out of the same set of experiments, and he is often credited with the double boiler as well, though vessels of that kind long predate him. These potato puddings belong to that project rather than to any regional tradition: the potato supplies bulk at minimum cost, and the single ounce of suet, cheese, cured herring or dried beef is the smallest quantity that will make it palatable.