Home › The Principles of Cookery › POTATO PUFFS (another way)
POTATO PUFFS (another way)
Bake two large potatoes. When done enough, burst them open and scoop out the contents with a spoon. Beat them until quite smooth, and mix with them two ounces of flour, a pinch of salt, a little grated nutmeg, a heaped table-spoonful of sugar, half an ounce of butter, and a well-beaten egg. Divide the mixture into small cakes, fry them in hot fat till they are nicely browned, drain them on blotting-paper, and serve very hot. Send white sauce to table with them. Time to fry, four or five minutes. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for one person.
A sweetened potato fritter, closer to a beignet than a side dish. It works if the potato is dry and floury and the batter is not overworked.
- Potato choice and bakingUse two large floury potatoes — russets or Maris Piper — and bake rather than boil them; the recipe gives no oven setting, but a hot oven for around an hour will dry the flesh out. Waterlogged flesh gives a batter that will not hold its shape in the fat.
- Mash while hotScoop and pass the flesh through a ricer or sieve while it is still steaming. "Beat until quite smooth" is the instruction that matters: cold potato is harder to smooth and takes more working, which tends to make the puffs heavy.
- Weights into cupsTwo ounces of flour is a scant half cup; half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. Two large baked potatoes yield roughly 12 oz of flesh, so the mixture is mostly potato with just enough flour to bind.
- Frying temperature"Hot fat" is best read as 350-375F. Four or five minutes at that heat cooks them through; hotter and the sugar in the batter browns before the centre sets. The recipe does not say how deep the fat should be.
- Blotting-paperVictorian kitchens drained fried food on unglazed blotting paper. Use paper towels or a wire rack over a tray.
- The white sauceGiven the sugar and nutmeg, this is most likely a sweet white sauce — milk thickened with a little flour and butter and sugared — rather than a savoury bechamel, though the recipe says only "white sauce." Custard or a plain cream sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldThe recipe says "sufficient for one person." Two potatoes will in practice give a good handful of small cakes, which most modern cooks would spread between two.
Cassell's gives several versions of potato puffs, and this one belongs to the long nineteenth-century habit of treating the potato as a sweet as readily as a savoury: sugar, nutmeg and a sweet white sauce put it in the same family as potato pudding and potato cheesecakes, both of which appear in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward. The "probable cost, 3d" is characteristic of Cassell's, which often gave a price for readers keeping household accounts, and a threepenny sweet made from two baked potatoes and one egg was presumably an inexpensive dish to put on the table. Nutmeg with potato looks odd now, but it was the standard sweet spice for starchy and milky dishes of the period, used in the same way modern cooks reach for vanilla or cinnamon.