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Mashed Potatoes
Cook potatoes in boiling salted water. Drain, mash.
To each cup of mashed potato, allow one tablespoon butter, one half teaspoon salt, one eighth teaspoon pepper, and hot milk to make of creamy consistency. Beat with a fork until light.
A bare-bones ratio recipe rather than a set of instructions, and the ratio is the useful part: one tablespoon butter and about a quarter teaspoon salt per cup of mashed potato, milk to taste.
- The hinge: dry the potatoesAfter draining, return the potatoes to the hot empty pan for a minute or two over low heat to drive off surface water. Wet potatoes take up less butter and turn soupy when the milk goes in.
- Milk must be hotThe recipe specifies hot milk for a reason. Cold milk cools the mass and makes it gluey rather than light, and reheating after mashing does not undo it.
- Beat with a fork, not a mixerA fork, ricer or masher keeps the starch cells intact. A food processor or high-speed mixer bursts them and gives a stretchy, wallpaper-paste texture.
- Choice of potatoThe recipe does not specify a variety. Russets or another high-starch, mealy potato mash lightest; waxy new potatoes will resist and go waxy-dense.
- Cook whole or in large piecesPeeled and quartered is fine, but small dice waterlog. Simmer rather than hard-boil until a knife slides through with no resistance, roughly 20-25 minutes depending on size.
- YieldAbout a pound of raw potatoes gives roughly a cup and a half to two cups mashed, so two pounds and three to four tablespoons of butter will serve four.
- SeasoningAn eighth teaspoon of pepper per cup is more assertive than most modern mashed potato; taste as you go, and use white pepper if you object to the black flecks.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside the chocolate recipes it carries a full domestic-science course covering meats, vegetables and puddings. The vegetable chapter reflects the Boston Cooking School method then dominant in American instruction: recipes given as proportions per cup rather than as narratives. Mashed potatoes were long established on American and British tables well before this book -- directions for mashing potatoes appear in eighteenth-century English cookery books -- and the insistence on hot milk and beating until light is characteristic of the domestic-science era's attempt to codify what had been a matter of a cook's judgment.