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Potatoes, Rolled
Take two pounds of boiled potatoes, dry and floury. Mash them well, flavour with grated nutmeg, and beat them up with an ounce of clarified butter, a table-spoonful of sherry, and the yolks of two eggs. Make the mixture into a roll, brush it over with beaten egg, sprinkle finely-grated bread-crumbs equally over it, and bake in a well-buttered dish till it is nicely browned all over. Serve on a hot dish, and pour over it a sauce prepared as follows. Beat the yolk of an egg, and mix with it two glassfuls of light wine. Add a little sugar and grated nutmeg, and whisk the mixture over the fire until it begins to thicken. Take it off at once, and serve immediately. Time, two or three minutes to boil the sauce; about half an hour to brown the roll. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian potato roll served under a warm wine sabayon — closer to a sweet-savoury pudding than a side dish. The hinge is the sauce: it must thicken without setting.
- The sauce is the risk pointWhisked egg yolk with wine thickens at around 160-175F and scrambles not far above that. Use a bowl over barely simmering water rather than direct heat, whisk constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the whisk. The original's "take it off at once" is the whole instruction.
- GlassfulA wine glass in Victorian recipe books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so two glassfuls is roughly half a cup. "Light wine" means a low-alcohol white — a Riesling, Moselle or similar; a dry Marsala gives the richer, zabaglione-like result.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the instruction is simply to bake till nicely browned. For browning a starchy roll in about half an hour, a moderately hot oven of roughly 375-400F should suit; lower and the crumbs pale, higher and the outside colours before the centre heats through.
- Dry and floury potatoesRussets or a similar high-starch variety, boiled and then returned to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to drive off steam. Waxy potatoes make a wet, gluey mixture that will not hold a roll shape.
- Clarified butterAn ounce is 2 tablespoons. Clarified butter may have been asked for because the water in whole butter loosens the mash; ghee is a close substitute.
- ShapingForm the roll, then chill it for twenty minutes before egg-washing and crumbing. Cold mash takes a cleaner coat and holds its shape in the oven.
- Crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs grated from stale bread, not soft fresh ones and not panko. Fine dry crumbs brown evenly across a curved surface.
- Yield and servingFour or five, as stated. Sauce it at the table — the sabayon will begin to weep within a few minutes of leaving the heat.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English potato pudding, when boiled potatoes were routinely enriched with butter, egg yolk, wine and nutmeg and treated as a course in their own right rather than a plain accompaniment. The sauce here is a sabayon in all but name: yolks beaten with wine and sugar over gentle heat, a technique generally traced to Italy as zabaglione and taken up across nineteenth-century European kitchens as an all-purpose warm dessert sauce. Its appearance over a potato roll marks the period's comfortable blurring of sweet and savoury, a habit that had largely faded from English dining by the twentieth century. The costing — 8d, wine excluded — is characteristic of the dictionary format, which priced nearly every entry so that a household could judge a dish before committing to it; such exclusions were routine, wine prices being variable.