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Potato and Meat Puffs
From some cold roast meat remove all gristle and fat and put through the food chopper. Season it highly, adding, if liked, some finelyminced cucumber or gherkin pickle or 1 teaspoonful of mustard pickle sauce. Mash some freshly-boiled mealy potatoes, let stand for five minutes, then work to a paste with I or more beaten eggs, according to quantity, adding salt and just sufficient flour to bind. Roll out rather thick, cut into large circles. Put I spoonful of the meat on each, double over and press the edges together with a fork. Bake in greased pans or fry in a little hot dripping.
A leftovers dish built on potato pastry, with almost every quantity left to the cook's judgment. The two things that decide whether it works are the dryness of the potato and the restraint with the flour.
- Mealy potatoes matter"Mealy" means floury and dry — russets or Maris Piper, not waxy new potatoes. Drain them well and let the steam escape for the five minutes the recipe specifies, or the paste will need so much flour to bind that it turns leaden.
- Working quantitiesThe recipe fixes nothing except '1 or more beaten eggs, according to quantity'. As a starting point only, for around 2 lb of potatoes try 1 large egg and a modest amount of flour, adding more only until the dough rolls without sticking; yield will depend entirely on how large you cut the circles.
- Mix the potato warmBeat the egg and flour into the potato while it is still warm but not hot; cold mashed potato resists and hot potato will scramble the egg. Chilling the finished dough for 20 minutes makes it far easier to roll and cut.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature or time is given. A moderately hot oven, around 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, will crisp and brown them; judge by colour rather than the clock.
- DrippingThe recipe calls simply for dripping, the saved fat from roasting, which was a common frying fat in economical kitchens. Lard, bacon fat or a neutral oil all work; use a shallow layer in a heavy pan over medium-high heat.
- Mustard pickle sauceMost likely the sauce or liquor from a jar of mustard pickle, the turmeric-and-mustard pickle of the piccalilli family. A teaspoon of the sauce or a spoonful of the chopped pickle itself will both do the job.
- Reheating cooked meatThe filling is already-cooked roast, so the cooking is a reheat. Use meat that has been refrigerated, not left standing, and take the puffs to steaming hot right through — 165F at the centre.
- SealingPotato dough has no gluten to speak of and splits readily. Press the edges firmly with a fork, patch any cracks with a scrap of dough, and keep the filling well back from the rim.
Potato-crust turnovers of this kind belong to the long tradition of made-over dishes — the Monday and Tuesday cookery that used up Sunday's roast before refrigeration made a joint keep. Household recipe collections gathered such dishes under headings like rissoles, croquettes, cutlets and puffs, all variations on minced cold meat given a new shape and a crisp outside. The distinguishing move here is using potato in place of pastry, which saved both flour and fat at a time when both were costed carefully, and the food chopper mentioned in the first line was the hand-cranked clamp-on mincer that had become standard equipment in working kitchens by the turn of the twentieth century. The instruction to "season it highly" is doing real work: reheated meat loses savour, and pickle, mustard and a heavy hand with the pepper were the accepted correctives.