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Nut and Potato Patties
5 ounces of potatoes 2 ounces pine kernels 2 ounces of almonds or walnuts 1 ounce butter 1 tablespoon cream A little parsley Pepper and salt Cook, and mash the potatoes with the butter and cream, and cut into rounds about two inches thick, with a tumbler; cover with moist bread crumbs, and fry in boiling oil until the outside is quite crisp. Take them out, and drain them, and make a hole in the center. Remove all the soft potato inside, or as much as possible without breaking the case. Grind the nuts together through a nut mill, and fill up the potato case with this. Or, if preferred, a filling of grated cheese is very nice, with a little chopped parsley on top. The above quantity will make six patties.
A small Edwardian savoury: fried mashed-potato cases with a raw ground-nut filling. The recipe is short but it hides one real difficulty, which is getting a mash stiff enough to survive hot oil.
- The hinge: a dry, cold mashFive ounces of potato with butter and cream is a soft mixture, and soft mash disintegrates the moment it meets the fryer. Use a floury potato, dry it over the heat after draining, and chill the shaped rounds thoroughly (an hour in the refrigerator, or 20 minutes in the freezer) before crumbing.
- "Two inches thick"Probably means two inches across, cut with the rim of a drinking glass, since the quantity given could not produce six rounds two inches deep. Note that five ounces of potato is a very small amount for six cases, so expect small, shallow rounds.
- Weights5 ounces of potatoes is one medium potato, about 140 g. Two ounces each of pine nuts and almonds or walnuts is roughly 1/2 cup of each. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons.
- Moist bread crumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, lightly dampened so they cling — not dry packaged crumbs. For a sturdier coating, dip the chilled rounds in beaten egg first, which the original omits.
- "Boiling oil"Oil that shimmers and browns a crumb in under a minute: 350-375F. Below that the cases soak and slump.
- Nut millA rotary nut grinder. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same job, but stop while the texture is still crumbly or the pine nuts turn to paste. Toasting the nuts first adds flavour the original leaves flat.
- Filling and temperatureThe nut filling goes in raw and cold into a hot case, so fill immediately and serve at once. The cheese variant benefits from a moment under the broiler.
- YieldSix patties. As a main dish for two, double everything and serve with a sauce -- the patties are dry on their own.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of vegetarian cookery writing that came out of Britain and America around the turn of the twentieth century, much of it connected to the food-reform and temperance movements, and it leans heavily on nuts. Nuts were the period's answer to the protein question: they were understood to be concentrated and "nourishing," and nut mills, nut butters and nut "meats" were sold specifically to vegetarian households. Pine kernels were imported, which may suggest this is a genteel recipe rather than an economical one. The construction — fry a potato case, hollow it, fill it — is a general form of the period rather than one with a traceable pedigree, and the substitution of ground nuts for the usual minced meat or game is exactly the move the whole book is built on.