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Potatoes, Cold, to Re-Cook
When potatoes are left after being served, they may be sent to table again in two or three ways. They may be mixed with cabbages, and made into colcannon (see COLCANNON), or they may be made into a salad (see POTATO SALAD), or they may be warmed with cream (see POTATOES A LA CREME and SLICED, WITH PARMESAN), or they may be sliced and fried (see POTATOES, COLD, FRIED IN SLICES), or they may be more simply fried, as follows. Melt a piece of clean dripping in a frying-pan, slice the potatoes into this, season with pepper and salt, and keep stirring them about until they are quite hot. Serve immediately. Or beat up cold potatoes till they are quite free from lumps. With one pound of the pulp mix two table-spoonfuls of flour, a little pepper and salt, an ounce of butter, and as much milk as will moisten the mashed potatoes. Press them into a plain mould, and bake in a moderate oven until they are nicely browned. Serve very hot. Or take the remains of mashed potatoes as soon as they come from the table. Press them lightly into a small mould, and leave them until the next day. Half an hour before they are wanted, turn them out, cut them into slices half an inch thick, and brown them in a baking-tin in the oven.
Three usable methods hide inside a cross-reference list: a quick fry in dripping, a baked potato loaf, and cold moulded mash sliced and browned. All three depend on potatoes that were boiled or mashed plain, without butter-heavy enrichment.
- Moderate oven"A moderate oven" is conventionally read as about 350-375F (180-190C). For the baked mould, allow roughly 40-50 minutes for a browned crust. The last method gives no temperature at all; the recipe's "half an hour before they are wanted" is the whole lead time, including turning out and slicing, not a stated baking time.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping is still the right fat here and gives the flavour the entry assumes. Lard, bacon fat or clarified butter all work; ordinary butter will scorch before the slices heat through.
- Don't stir the fried versionThe instruction to "keep stirring" produces hot potato rather than crisp potato. Lay the slices in a single layer in hot fat, leave them undisturbed until the undersides are browned, then turn once.
- One pound of pulpA pound of mashed potato is roughly two cups packed, from about 1 lb 4 oz of raw potatoes. With the two tablespoons of flour and an ounce of butter it makes enough for a small mould or loaf tin and serves three to four as a side.
- "As much milk as will moisten"Deliberately vague because it depends how dry the leftover mash is. Add it a tablespoon at a time and stop while the mixture still holds a shape when pressed; if it slumps it will not brown or turn out of the mould.
- Grease and line the mouldNeither version mentions it, but both need a buttered tin, and the baked loaf turns out more reliably from a lined one. The overnight version relies on the mash setting firm in the fridge, not on a warm larder.
- Overnight mash, kept coldThe original simply says to leave the moulded potato until the next day, without saying where. Refrigerate it, covered; cooked potato left for hours at room temperature can support Bacillus cereus.
- Free from lumpsBeating cold mash smooth by hand is right; do not use a food processor or stick blender, which ruptures the starch cells and turns the pulp to glue.
The Victorian kitchen ran on the assumption that nothing left the table for the bin. Potatoes were the cheapest bulk on a British plate by the 1870s, boiled in quantity for every dinner, and a dictionary of cookery was expected to tell a cook what to do with the surplus as much as how to cook it fresh. The cross-references gathered here — colcannon, potato salad, potatoes à la crème, fried in slices — amount to a small map of nineteenth-century leftover practice, running from Irish country cooking to the French service that fashionable English households were then borrowing. The moulded, sliced and browned version is essentially the ancestor of the potato cake: cold mash, bound with a little flour and fat, given a crust it never had the first time round.