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Mashed Potatoes
Boil or steam the potatoes until they are sufficiently cooked, and are mealy and dry. Carefully remove any discolored places there may be upon them, beat them with a wooden spoon or masher, whilst beating; add a little salt, a piece of butter, and 1 or 2 tablespoonfuls of boiling milk or cream. When the beaten potatoes are quite smooth and free from lumps, put them into a saucepan, and beat them over the fire for a minute or two, till they are light and quite hot. Dish them lightly, and draw the fork backwards over them to roughen the surface.
A straightforward late-Victorian method whose only real technique is heat management: everything that touches the potato should be hot, and the beating should be brief.
- Potato choice"Mealy and dry" points to a floury variety — russet, King Edward, Maris Piper. Waxy potatoes will not break down into the light, fluffy mass the method assumes.
- Boiling milk mattersCold milk cools the mass and forces longer beating to bring it back up to heat; the recipe calls for the milk or cream to be boiling. A scant 1/2 cup per 2 lb of potatoes is a reasonable starting point.
- Beat briefly, not thoroughlyA minute or two over the fire is genuinely the limit. Prolonged working, and especially a food processor or blender, ruptures the starch cells and turns mashed potato into paste. A masher, ricer or food mill is correct.
- "Over the fire"Low to medium-low heat on the stovetop. The aim is to drive off residual water and warm the mixture through, not to brown or scorch the bottom.
- Discolored placesThe instruction covers grey patches, bruises and any green tinge beneath the skin. Green flesh signals solanine and is bitter; cut it away rather than mash it in.
- QuantitiesThe original gives no weights. Two pounds of potatoes with roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 1/2 cup hot milk serves four; the recipe's "1 or 2 tablespoonfuls" of milk seems to assume a much smaller quantity of potato.
- Roughening the surfaceDragging a fork over the mounded potato gives the ridged finish the original asks for. The recipe takes it no further, though the same ridges will brown if such a dish is later put under a grill.
Mashed potato appears in English cookery books well before the Victorian period, and by the nineteenth century had settled into close to this form: boiled floury potato, butter, hot milk, beaten smooth and dished up in a rough-topped mound. The forked surface is a period habit, and it survives today in the crust of a shepherd's pie. A general household volume of this kind was expected to be complete, covering the plainest vegetable dish alongside the showpieces. The insistence on boiling milk is the detail this method leans on hardest.