Home › Vegetables › Potato Puff
Potato Puff
1 pint of hot mashed potatoes; 1/2 cupful of hot milk or cream; 1 tablespoonful of butter; 2 eggs; 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley; seasoning.
Mash the potatoes light and fine. Add the seasoning. Heat the milk or cream and butter together, beat them well, and add to the potatoes. After cooling a little, stir in one egg. Then mould into small balls. Brush the rest of the egg over the balls, and brown them on a buttered tin. The parsley may be stirred in, or sprinkled over.
Instead of moulding into balls, the mass of potato may be heaped up in a shallow bakingdish in irregular shape and browned for ten minutes. This will give it a puffy appearance. In the latter method it is well to beat the yolks and whites of the eggs separately.
A simple duchesse-style potato, given in two forms: piped or moulded balls, or a rough-heaped dish browned in the oven. The recipe assumes you already have hot mashed potato on hand.
- Work while hotThe recipe stresses temperature: mash and combine the potatoes while they are still hot, so the starch takes up the hot milk and butter smoothly. Mashed potato that has gone cold and is then reworked tends to turn gluey. (The recipe does have you let the mixture cool a little before the egg goes in.)
- A pint of potatoesThat is 2 cups of mashed potato by volume, from roughly 1 lb of floury potatoes such as russets. Weigh before peeling and boiling.
- Cupful and tablespoonfulTreat the cupful as 8 fl oz, so half a cupful is 4 fl oz. Period tablespoons may have run a little larger than the modern 15 ml measure, but nothing here is sensitive enough to matter.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the original cook judged by the fire. A hot oven will brown either version; the recipe gives ten minutes for the heaped form, and the balls are best watched and taken out when coloured.
- The two eggsOne whole egg goes into the mixture and the remainder of the second is brushed over the balls as a glaze. For the heaped version the recipe says only that it is well to beat the yolks and whites separately; the puffy appearance it promises is credited in the text to the irregular heaping and the browning.
- SeasoningRead this as salt and pepper. A pint of potato needs about a teaspoon of salt, and grated nutmeg is a traditional and unobtrusive addition.
- Buttered tinA shallow baking sheet, well greased. Parchment is easier and the browning is the same, though the undersides colour a little less.
- YieldServes four as a side dish; the number of balls depends on how large you mould them.