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Potato Turnovers
Boil and mash sufficient potatoes to measure 1 pint. As soon as mashed add I well-beaten egg, salt and pepper to taste and 1 tablespoonful of flour. Turn on a well floured board, roll out عامة carefully and cut in circles the size of a tea saucer. On each place a large spoonful of cold meat chopped very fine and highly seasoned.
Double over and pinch each together like a turnover. Arrange on a flat greased pan, brown in a hot oven and serve with a brown or tomato sauce.
A thrifty way to use leftover roast meat, built on a potato dough that behaves nothing like pastry. The success of the dish rests on how dry the mashed potato is.
- Dry the potatoesBoil the potatoes whole in their skins, or drain and return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute or two before mashing. Wet potato will absorb far more flour than the recipe allows and the dough will slump on the board.
- QuantitiesA pint of mashed potato is 2 cups, roughly 1 lb of raw potatoes. With 1 egg and 1 tablespoon of flour this makes about six saucer-sized turnovers, serving two or three.
- Mash while hotThe instruction to add the egg "as soon as mashed" is worth following; the mash is easier to work and the egg is more evenly incorporated while the potato is still hot. Dough mixed from cold mash tends to be slacker.
- RollingFlour the board and the pin generously and roll to about a quarter inch. If the dough tears, chill it for twenty minutes rather than adding more flour, which makes the turnovers heavy.
- A hot ovenRead that as roughly 400-450F. Lower heat lets the potato dry out and crack before it colours. Brush the tops with oil or melted butter for an even brown.
- The fillingCold cooked meat only, minced fine and seasoned hard, with a spoonful of gravy or sauce to moisten it. Raw meat will not cook through in the time the shell takes to brown.
- SealingDamp the edges with water before folding and press firmly with a fork. Any gap will open in the oven and the filling will run onto the pan.
- TimingAbout 20-25 minutes, turning the pan once, until the surfaces are freckled and firm. Serve straight away; they soften as they sit.
Potato dough turnovers of this kind may be seen as belonging to a long tradition of stretching a small amount of meat across a starchy casing, arguably kin to the Irish potato cake, the Polish pierogi and the various fried potato croquettes that filled economical cookery books at the turn of the twentieth century. Their appearance in a low-cost collection, filed under vegetables rather than meat, is telling: the potato is the substance of the dish and the "large spoonful of cold meat" is the seasoning. Books of this period are often said to have assumed a household had yesterday's roast in the larder and needed only a way to present it again without apology, and highly seasoned mince inside a plain wrapper, sauced brown or perhaps with tomato, plausibly did that work in kitchens on both sides of the Atlantic.