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Potato Pudding
May be made by putting potatoes prepared exactly as above directed, in a pudding dish, and baking.--Mrs. S. T.
This is a one-line variation, not a standalone recipe: everything of substance lives in the entry printed above it in the book. Read it as an instruction to bake a mashed-potato mixture rather than serve or fry it.
- Find the parent recipe first"Prepared exactly as above directed" refers to the immediately preceding entry in the same section, whose ingredients this line does not restate. Without that entry in front of you there are no quantities at all, so do not attempt this line on its own.
- Eggs are the hingeIf the parent mixture contains beaten eggs, it will set into a sliceable pudding; if it does not, baking simply browns a dish of mashed potato. When in doubt, two eggs per pound of cooked potato gives a pudding that holds its shape without turning rubbery.
- Sweet or whiteVirginia cookbooks of this period treat sweet potatoes and "Irish" (white) potatoes as separate ingredients, and both were baked into puddings. Sweet-potato versions are usually sweetened and spiced; white-potato puddings of the period appear both as savory sides and, sugared and flavored, as sweet puddings. Which one you have depends entirely on the entry above.
- "Pudding dish"A deep earthenware or tin dish; what size depends on how much mixture the parent recipe yields. Butter it well; a potato mixture with eggs in it will weld itself to bare ceramic.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this kind of mixture; timing depends on the depth of the dish, on the order of 40 to 50 minutes, until the top is browned and the center is set and no longer wet when a knife is drawn through it.
- YieldDepends entirely on the quantity made up in the parent recipe.
- SurfaceDot the top with butter before it goes in, or brush with cream partway through, if you want a browned crust.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, carried contributions from some 250 Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries are signed only with initials like "Mrs. S. T." and why so many read as terse afterthoughts to the recipe above: they were notes for a cook who already knew the household's basic method and needed only the variation. The baked potato pudding itself belongs to an older English tradition in which "pudding" covered bound, baked or boiled mixtures, savory as well as sweet, and in which starchy vegetables enriched with eggs, butter and cream were pressed into service both as a side dish and as dessert. In Virginia the sweet potato made that ambiguity permanent: the same construction, differently seasoned, could arrive with the meat or after it, and the sweetened branch of the family is closely related to the sweet-potato puddings and pies still made in the region.