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Mashed Potatoes
Boil the potatoes and drain well as it is important that they should be very dry. Put them through a sieve or through a ricer and return to the saucepan. Beat in one tablespoon of butter, until it is thoroughly mixed, then add half a cup of milk, and season with salt and pepper. Beat well and pile lightly on the serving dish. Serve immediately. Or the mashed potatoes may be put in a baking dish covered with bits of cheese and butter and browned in the oven.
A plain method with one hinge: dryness. The original gives no potato quantity, so scale by the butter and milk given — one tablespoon butter and half a cup of milk suits roughly 2 lb of potatoes.
- The hinge is dry potatoesAfter draining, return the potatoes to the empty hot pan for a minute or two over low heat and let the surface steam off. Wet potatoes will not absorb butter and turn gluey when beaten.
- Choose a mealy potatoRussets or another floury variety rice cleanly and drink up the butter. Waxy new potatoes hold water and go waxy and elastic under the beater.
- Butter before milk, and mean itButter before milk -- The recipe does put the butter in first, and there is sense in it: fat coating the starch is commonly credited with keeping the milk from making the mash sticky. Beat the butter in fully before the milk goes near the pan.
- Warm the milkHalf a cup of cold milk into hot riced potato drops the temperature and stiffens the mash. Heat it to steaming first.
- Beat by hand onlyBeat by hand -- A wooden spoon, a masher or the ricer itself. A food processor, or hard beating at high speed, overworks the starch and produces paste.
- Pile lightly"Pile lightly" means do not pack or smooth it down. Heaped loosely, the mash keeps air and stays light; pressed flat it compacts within a minute or two.
- The oven variationFor the cheese-topped version, 400F for 15 to 20 minutes browns the top without drying the interior; the broiler for 3 to 4 minutes does it faster. Use a firm grating cheese so it colours rather than pooling.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of potatoes serves four as a side dish.
Mashed potatoes filed under "Meat Substitutes" reflects how wartime and early-twentieth-century cookery books thought about food: not as dishes but as nutritional slots to be filled. Meatless Cookery belongs to the run of books published around the First World War, when meat was scarce and priced beyond many households, and cooks were urged to build meals from potatoes, cheese, beans and eggs. The pairing here — mash browned under cheese and butter — is the whole argument in miniature: dairy fat and protein carrying a starch into the centre of the plate. Riced potato was the refinement of the day; the potato ricer, a hinged press that extrudes cooked potato through a perforated plate, was widely sold in this period, valued for the smoothness it produced.