Potato Snow
Peel and boil in a saucepan, six large mealy white potatoes. Add a little salt to the water. Take them out one by one, leaving the saucepan on the fire. Rub through a sieve into a deep dish, letting it fall in a mound. Do not touch with a spoon or the hand. Have a sauce-boat of melted butter to serve with it at table.--Mrs. S. T.
A dish that lives or dies on texture: the point is loose, unpacked shreds of potato that hold their shape like drifted snow. Everything in the method exists to keep air in them.
- The hingeNever press, smooth or stir the riced potato once it falls into the dish. Any contact compacts the strands into mash and the effect is gone. Serve it as it lands, and carry it to the table promptly.
- Potato choice"Mealy white" means a high-starch, low-moisture potato — a russet answers best. Waxy reds and new potatoes are too moist and will come through the sieve as paste rather than shreds.
- Why they come out one at a timeThe pan stays on the heat so the remaining potatoes hold their temperature while you work. Cold potato stiffens and clogs the sieve, and the finished mound wants to be hot when it reaches the table.
- Sieve or ricerA drum sieve and wooden spatula is the period tool; a potato ricer held directly over the dish does the same job faster and disturbs the strands less. A food mill on its coarsest plate also works. A food processor does not — it develops the starch into glue.
- Dry them firstDrain thoroughly and let the potatoes steam off in the hot pan for a minute before ricing. Surface water is what turns snow into a slump.
- "Melted butter" in this book"Melted butter" -- In nineteenth-century usage the phrase could mean a thin flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain drawn butter; the recipe does not say which is meant here. A sauce boat of either suits the dish; season it well, since the potato itself is barely salted.
- YieldSix large potatoes make a side dish for six to eight. It does not reheat or hold — make it at the last moment.
Potato snow appears in English and American cookery books through the nineteenth century as a genteel side dish — a way of making a cheap root vegetable look ornamental on a dinner table, with the butter served alongside rather than worked in. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is full of such short, initialled entries — recipes traded between households and printed almost as they were dictated, which is why this one assumes the reader already knows how long a potato takes to boil.