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White Potato Custard (Grate four good-sized potatoes)
Grate four good-sized potatoes into one quart of milk. Beat four eggs without separating until light, add the milk and potato. Add one cup of sugar, a teaspoonful of cinnamon, a grating of nutmeg, or you may add the juice and rind of one lemon. Mix thoroughly, pour into deep pans lined with paste, bake in a quick oven thirty minutes.
This is a custard pie, not a side dish: four grated raw potatoes stand in for part of the thickening that flour or cornstarch would otherwise do. The whole thing hinges on grating the potatoes straight into the milk.
- Grate into the milk, not into a bowlRaw grated potato discolours quickly once exposed to air, and the discoloration can carry into the baked custard. Grating directly into the quart of milk plausibly keeps the colour clean; do it on the fine side of a box grater and stir as you go.
- Potato quantity"Four good-sized potatoes" probably comes to something like 1 1/2 to 2 lb, giving roughly 4 cups of loosely packed gratings. A floury russet gives more thickening; a waxy potato leaves visible shreds.
- "Paste" is pie pastryA plain short crust rolled thin. "Deep pans" means pie plates, and the plural is deliberate: a quart of milk plus eggs, sugar and potato makes a large volume of filling, enough for at least two shells.
- "A quick oven" and why to ignore itA quick oven is generally reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. That is right for setting the bottom crust but too hot to hold for a whole egg custard, which curdles and weeps above roughly 185F. Start hot for 10-15 minutes, then drop to 325-350F and bake until the centre is just barely wobbly, around 170F on an instant-read thermometer.
- Thirty minutes is optimisticA quart of liquid custard in a deep shell needs closer to 50–65 minutes in total at the lower temperature. Judge by set, not by clock.
- Sugar and spiceOne cup of sugar to a quart of milk is mild by modern pie standards and correct here — the potato is starchy, not sweet. Use the lemon or the cinnamon and nutmeg, as the original suggests; together they muddy each other.
- Blind-baking helpsA wet filling on raw pastry is a perennial problem, and here the only defence is the initial blast of heat. Partially baking the shells for 12 minutes with weights gives a more reliable base.
- YieldTwo pies, 12 to 16 slices. Best eaten the day it is baked; potato starch firms and turns slightly gluey after a night in the refrigerator.
Vegetable custard pies were a standard part of the American sweet repertoire through the nineteenth century, and the potato version sits alongside better-known sweet potato, carrot, squash and pumpkin pies -- all built on the same frame of milk, eggs, sugar and spice bound by a starchy vegetable. That a book called How to Cook Vegetables files a dessert under "Vegetables" says something about how these cookbooks were organised: by raw material rather than by course. The word "paste" for pastry, long standard in English and American cookery writing, was on its way out by the time this was printed and survives now mainly in "puff paste."