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Riced Potatoes with Cheese
Mix with riced potatoes two tablespoons of butter, one teaspoon of salt, a shake of paprika, and one-half cup of milk. Beat with a silver fork until creamy, and put in a baking dish. To one-half cup of cream add one-half cup grated cheese, and season with paprika and salt. Spread over the potatoes, and put in the oven for a few minutes until brown.
A plain baked mash with a cream-and-cheese glaze. The original assumes you know how much potato you started with, so the proportions need pinning down.
- Quantity of potatoesThe recipe never says. The butter, milk and salt given would suit somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 lb of potatoes, roughly 3 to 4 cups riced. Scale the topping with it.
- Riced, not mashedA ricer or food mill pressed while the potatoes are still hot gives the dry, fluffy texture the recipe depends on. A food processor or blender turns potato starch to glue.
- The silver forkSilver was sometimes called for on the belief that iron and steel darkened potatoes. Any fork or a wooden spoon works; what matters is beating briskly by hand rather than overworking the starch.
- Cream"Cream" here means something close to modern heavy or whipping cream. Half a cup poured over the surface with the cheese sets into a glaze; milk will thin out and soak in.
- CheeseAn unqualified "grated cheese" in an American book of this date most likely means a cheddar-type cheese. A firmer, drier cheese will brown well under the cream.
- Oven temperature"A few minutes until brown" implies a hot oven; something in the region of 425-450F, or the broiler with the dish a few inches down, will do it. The potatoes are already cooked, so this is browning only -- five to ten minutes at most.
- YieldWith about 2 lb of potatoes, four to six as a side dish, or fewer if served as a main course.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the wave of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when wheatless and meatless days were a matter of national campaign rather than personal preference, and when the Lenten and vegetarian traditions already in circulation suddenly acquired a patriotic use. Its "Meat Substitutes" section works largely by protein arithmetic: cheese, eggs, milk and legumes were promoted as standing in for meat at a fraction of the cost, and a dish like this one is essentially a mash upgraded into a main course by the cream and cheese laid over it. Riced potatoes were themselves a mark of good technique in this period, the ricer being a common piece of kitchen equipment and the resulting lightness a point of pride; the instruction to beat with a silver fork reflects a widely repeated belief that steel discoloured potatoes, more folk caution than chemistry.