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Potato Balls
Add to one pint hot mashed potatoes, one eighth teaspoon celery salt, one teaspoon chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and butter to taste, and enough hot milk to make of consistency to shape. Form into smooth round balls, bake in hot buttered pan; or sauté in butter; or fry in deep fat. Or they may be sautéd in sausage fat, which gives an appetizing flavor.
A simple recipe whose success rests entirely on how much milk goes in. Everything else is seasoning and choice of fat.
- The hinge: milkAdd the hot milk a spoonful at a time and stop the moment the mash holds a shape when pressed in the palm. Potatoes vary enormously in how much liquid they absorb; go one splash too far and the balls slump in the pan or come apart in the fryer.
- A pint of mashed potatoTwo cups, measured after mashing, which is roughly 1 lb of peeled potatoes. It yields eight to ten balls, serving three or four as a side dish.
- "Hot buttered pan" and oven heat"Hot buttered pan" -- The recipe gives no oven setting; if baking, a hot oven (in modern terms somewhere around 425-450F) and a pan buttered and preheated before the balls go in will start the undersides crusting immediately. Around twenty minutes, turning once, gives colour on more than one face.
- Choose a dry potatoRussets or another floury variety mash dry and bind well. Waxy new potatoes turn gluey when worked and will need almost no milk at all.
- Deep frying without a coatingThe original fries these bare, which works only if the mixture is stiff and thoroughly chilled first. Refrigerate the shaped balls at least half an hour; fat at 375F. A light dredge in flour or egg and crumbs is insurance the book does not mention.
- Sausage fatThe book's own favourite of the three finishes, and worth planning for: pour off and save the fat from breakfast sausage, then sauté the balls. It may carry some salt and seasoning from the sausage, so taste before salting the potato heavily.
- Celery saltAn eighth of a teaspoon in two cups of potato is deliberately faint, so measure rather than shake.
Potato balls belong to the large family of turn-of-the-century recipes for making yesterday's mashed potatoes worth serving again — cousins to potato croquettes, Duchess potatoes and the fried potato cakes of every farm kitchen. The recipe offers a three-way instruction: bake or sauté or deep fry. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; like other manufacturer-sponsored books of the era it pushed the company's product hard in the confectionery chapters while filling out the rest with a complete general cookery course, vegetables included. The suggestion to fry in sausage fat is a small window onto a kitchen where rendered drippings were collected as a matter of course rather than poured away.