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Riced Potatoes
Add salt and butter to mashed potatoes, and press them through a heated potato ricer into the hot dish in which they are to be served. Or add to the hot mashed potatoes 1 tablespoon of butter, 1/2 cup of milk, and 1 teaspoon of salt. Beat until creamy, using a silver fork. Pile lightly on serving dish.
A two-sentence method that assumes you already have a pot of mashed potatoes on the stove. The whole point is texture: the potato is pushed into its serving dish and left alone, never packed down.
- No quantity is givenThe recipe presumes an existing batch of mashed potato and offers no weight. The seasoning ratio given in the second method — 1 tablespoon butter, 1/2 cup milk, 1 teaspoon salt — would suit something in the region of a couple of pounds of potatoes, though the recipe itself says nothing about yield or servings.
- Heat the ricerThis is the instruction that matters. Cold metal chills the potato as it passes through and the strands set into pasty clumps. Run the ricer under hot water or hold it over steam, and warm the serving dish too.
- Do not disturb the riced strandsRiced potato is riced only until something touches it. Once it lands in the dish, leave it. Stirring or smoothing it back into a mash defeats the exercise.
- Potatoes to useA dry, floury potato — russet or a similar baking variety — rices into distinct strands. Waxy salad potatoes turn gluey under pressure and are the wrong choice here.
- The silver forkUsually explained as a caution against iron and carbon steel, which could discolour cut potato and other pale foods. Any modern stainless fork or whisk is fine; the intent is to beat air in by hand rather than to work the starch.
- Beating versus overbeatingThe second method wants the potato creamy, not elastic. Hand-beating for a minute or two is plenty; a food processor will break the starch cells and produce glue.
- Warm the milkCold milk stirred into hot potato drops the temperature and stiffens the mash. Heat it with the butter before it goes in.
- Why it sits under Meat SubstitutesThe recipe is grouped with meat substitutes rather than with side dishes, so plan the plate accordingly.
The potato ricer — a hinged press with a perforated basket — came into use in American kitchens in the later nineteenth century, and its selling point was what this recipe exploits: it produces separate strands rather than a beaten paste, so the potato arrives at the table looking light. The instruction to use a silver fork is usually explained by the fact that ordinary table cutlery was often carbon steel or iron, which could darken pale foods on contact; silver and, later, stainless steel solved a problem cooks no longer have.