Home › Vegetables › White Potato Custard (Light Beat the whites)
White Potato Custard (Light Beat the whites)
light. Beat the whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth, stir gently into the potatoes. Heap them on a baking-dish or drop by spoonfuls on greased paper. Dust with grated cheese and put in a quick oven till a golden brown. Serve hot.
The page picks up mid-sentence: the opening portion, which would have covered the boiled and mashed potatoes, the butter and milk, and the four egg yolks, is missing. What survives is the finishing method, and it works as written once you supply the base.
- The missing baseThe surviving text implies only mashed potatoes and four eggs whose yolks were used earlier. Any reconstruction is guesswork: something on the order of boiled, riced potatoes beaten light with butter, a little milk or cream, salt and the four yolks would suit the finishing method, but the printed page gives no quantities.
- "Quick oven"Usually read today as somewhere around 400-450F. At that sort of heat heaped mounds should set and colour fairly quickly, so watch them from about 15 minutes; much cooler and they are likely to dry out before browning.
- Greased paperParchment on a sheet pan is the direct modern equivalent, and needs no greasing. The older cook was using ordinary kitchen paper, which did.
- Folding, not stirring"Stir gently" means fold. Mashed potato is heavy enough to knock the air straight out of beaten whites, so lighten the potato with a spoonful of the froth first, then fold in the rest in two additions.
- Temperature of the potatoThe base should be warm, not hot. Whites folded into steaming potato begin to cook and deflate on contact.
- The cheeseA dry grating cheese browns best here " Parmesan, aged Gruy"re or a hard cheddar. Fresh, high-moisture cheese weeps and prevents the golden crust the recipe is after.
- Yield and timingTiming -- The printed fragment gives no yield. Like anything lifted with beaten whites, these will fall as they cool, so bake them last and carry them straight to the table.
Books of this period used names like potato "custard," "puff" and "snow" loosely, often for much the same principle: mashed potato enriched with yolks and lifted with separately beaten whites. The method is close kin to the French souffl", though the exact line of borrowing is not something this page can show, and such dishes fit a broader nineteenth-century interest in presenting the potato as a dish rather than a filler. Vegetable cookery of the era often leaned on this kind of transformation, moulding and baking vegetables rather than serving them plainly boiled.