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Potato Fondant, Uncooked
1/2 cup prepared Irish potatoes 1 egg white, unbeaten confectioner's sugar Potato fondant is another base--even more useful than potato paste--upon which many confections may be built. There are two kinds--cooked and uncooked. To make uncooked, boil or steam Irish potatoes, drain and force them through fine sieve. In all candy-making with potatoes, these directions are of utmost importance. Unless potato is carefully forced through fine sieve, candy made from it will have hard and gluey spots after it has dried out. Mix 1/2 cup of potato so prepared with unbeaten white of 1 egg. Add gradually confectioner's sugar until whole mass assumes consistency of bonbon cream. Several uses for potato fondant will be described below but it may be substituted for French fondant in any of the confections of which this is a part.
This is a no-cook confectionery base in which raw egg white is the only binder, and nothing in the process ever reaches a temperature that would make it safe. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a workaround.
- The egg white is never heatedThe white goes in unbeaten and raw, and the finished fondant is eaten as-is. Salmonella in shell eggs is an internal contamination risk, not only a shell one, so no amount of washing addresses it. Sugar and confectioner's sugar do not sterilise; a fondant at this moisture level has plenty of free water.
- Cooked potato as a growth mediumBoiled potato is low-acid, moist and starchy, and this mixture is worked by hand and then left at room temperature to dry. That combination supports Bacillus cereus and other spore-formers that survive boiling and multiply as the mass cools. A current, tested confectionery recipe should be used instead.
- Irish potatoesAn older American term for ordinary white potatoes, used to distinguish them from sweet potatoes, which were often simply called potatoes in the South. It carries no implication about variety or origin.
- Confectioner's sugarThen as now, powdered sugar; some period products included a little starch, which would affect how much the mass absorbed. The recipe gives no figure because the potato's moisture governs it, which means the yield is equally unstated.
- "Consistency of bonbon cream"A period benchmark for a workable fondant-type paste, firm enough to shape. The recipe itself says the base may be substituted for French fondant in any confection of which fondant is a part.
- The sieve instructionThe author is right that it is the hinge of the method. Unsieved potato leaves lumps of intact cell structure that dry into the "hard and gluey spots" described. This is a genuine textural insight about starch in sugar pastes, whatever the safety of the result.
Potato candy belongs to a long line of sugar-stretching household confectionery, and it appears repeatedly in American cookbooks of the period. French fondant proper is a boiled syrup worked to a fine crystal; cooked potato offered a cheap, bland, plastic body that carried a great deal of powdered sugar, and could be flavoured, coloured and dipped much the same way. The best-known survivor is the Appalachian potato-and-peanut-butter roll, generally traced in family practice to the early twentieth century rather than to any single printed source. The confident talk of a "base upon which many confections may be built" is very much of its moment, when domestic-science writing liked to present candy-making as a system of components rather than a list of separate treats.