Home › Cookery › Irish Potato Pudding
Irish Potato Pudding
1 pound mashed Irish potatoes. 1 pound sugar. 2 cupfuls butter, well creamed. 5 eggs. 1 teacup cream. 1 wine-glassful brandy.
Stir the ingredients thoroughly together. Bake in pastry without tops.-Mrs. Dr. J. F. G.
A potato custard pie in the same family as sweet potato pie, but built on plain white potatoes and carried by butter, brandy and eggs. It is very rich by modern standards, and the original gives no pan count, oven heat or time.
- "Irish potato" means white potatoIn Southern books of this period sweet potatoes are the default, so ordinary potatoes had to be marked as "Irish." Use a floury variety such as russet, boiled or baked, then riced or pressed through a sieve while hot so no lumps survive.
- Measure the potato by weight after mashingA pound of mashed potato is roughly two cups, packed, and comes from about a pound and a quarter of raw potato once peeled and trimmed. Weighing matters here because the custard sets on the ratio of starch to egg.
- Teacup and wine-glassA teacup in these books is reckoned at somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup, and a wine-glassful at about two fluid ounces, or a quarter cup. Neither is exact, but both are close enough for a custard filling.
- Two cupfuls of butter is a poundThat is equal in weight to the potato and the sugar, and produces a filling that is close to a buttercream once baked. Cooks who want a sliceable pie rather than a very soft one may cut the butter to half a pound; that is a departure from the text, not a correction of it.
- Cool the potato before the eggs go inCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then fold in potato that is warm at most. Hot potato will scramble the eggs and leave grainy streaks through the baked custard.
- Oven and timeThe original gives no oven heat or time; a moderate oven, around 350F, works. The filling is set when the edges are firm and the centre still trembles slightly, roughly 40 to 50 minutes for a nine-inch shell; carryover heat finishes it.
- "Bake in pastry without tops"Open pies, not a covered pudding. This quantity of filling is enough for two to three nine-inch shells. Blind-bake the crusts partway so the base does not go soft under a wet filling.
- The brandyMuch of the alcohol bakes off, though by no means all of it, and the flavour stays; it is doing the work that vanilla or spice does in later versions. Nutmeg or lemon zest is a period-appropriate addition if you want more than brandy alone.
- ServingCut each nine-inch pie into eight or ten slices. Serve at room temperature or cold, in small wedges.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housewives, is full of these butter-and-egg puddings baked in an open crust, a form that sits somewhere between the English sweet pudding and what Americans now simply call pie. Potato puddings of this kind are much older than the book: eighteenth-century English and colonial receipts treat boiled potato as a thickener for a rich custard in the same way they use bread, rice or almonds, and Virginia cooks adapted the idea to whichever tuber the garden gave up. The insistence on "Irish" potatoes is telling, since in Tyree's Virginia the sweet potato was common enough that it was the white potato that needed naming. The heavy hand with butter and brandy, and the attribution to a contributor known only by her husband's initials, are both characteristic of the collection.