Home › Vegetables › Mashed Potatoes
Mashed Potatoes
6 medium sized potatoes 3 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/3 cup hot milk Boil the potatoes, drain, dry a few minutes, mash until smooth; add butter, seasonings and milk. Beat until very light. Serve in hot dish. The potatoes may be passed through a sieve instead of mashing and then beaten light with seasonings and hot milk.
A plain early-twentieth-century formula that holds up entirely, provided the two details it takes for granted are respected: the potatoes must be dried after draining, and the milk must be hot.
- QuantitySix medium potatoes is roughly 2 to 2 1/4 lb, serving four to six. Russets or another dry, mealy variety mash lightest; waxy potatoes turn gluey under beating.
- "Dry a few minutes"This is the hinge. Return the drained potatoes to the hot dry pan over low heat and let the surface steam off for two or three minutes before mashing. Skipping it gives watery, slack potatoes no amount of butter will fix.
- Hot milkCold milk chills the starch and dulls the texture. Scald the 1/3 cup and add it gradually; you may want a little more, since modern potatoes vary in moisture.
- Beating"Beat until very light" would have been done by hand, with a spoon or masher. A hand mixer on low is fine, but a food processor or high-speed blender will make the starch stretch into paste within seconds.
- The sieve variationPassing the cooked potato through a sieve is what a ricer or food mill now does, and it produces the smoothest result. Do it while the potatoes are hot.
- SeasoningAn eighth teaspoon of pepper for 2 lb of potatoes is restrained by current taste, and half a teaspoon of salt is modest; the recipe says nothing about salting the cooking water. Correct the seasoning at the end.
- Serving"Serve in hot dish" is not decoration; mashed potatoes lose heat fast in a cold bowl and stiffen. Warm the serving dish and cover until it goes to the table.
Mashed potatoes appear in nearly every American cookbook of the period, and their presence in a flour company's promotional book is a reminder of what those volumes were: general household manuals with the sponsor's product woven through, not narrow baking pamphlets. Gold Medal issued cook books as advertising given away or sold cheaply with flour, so alongside the breads and cakes came a full domestic-science curriculum, vegetables included. The instruction to press the potato through a sieve rather than mash it is a technique that long predates the period, and the smoothness it aims at was widely treated as a mark of skill.