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Potatoes, How to use Cold
INGREDIENTS. -The remains of cold potatoes: to every lb, allow 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, 2 ditto of minced onions, 1 oz. of butter. milk.
Mash the potatoes with a fork until perfectly free from lumps; stir in the other ingredients, and add sufficient milk to moisten them well; press the potatoes into a mould, and bake in a moderate oven until nicely brown, which will be in from 20 minutes to 1/2 hour. Turn them out of the mould, and serve.
TIME. -20 minutes to hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
POTATOES, TO STEAM.
A leftover-potato dish of the plainest kind: mash, bind, bake, unmould. Two things decide whether it is worth eating — the onion and the moisture.
- Cook the onion firstTwenty to thirty minutes in a dense potato mass may not fully tame raw minced onion, and it can stay sharp. Soften it in the ounce of butter over low heat until translucent, then stir butter and onion together into the potato.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. The bake is largely there to set the outside and colour it.
- "Sufficient milk"Aim for a mixture stiff enough to hold a shape when pressed — roughly 3-4 tablespoons of milk per pound of potato, less if the mash was made with butter and cream to begin with. Too much milk and the loaf slumps when turned out.
- The mouldAny plain metal mould, pudding basin, or small loaf tin. Butter it generously and press the mixture in firmly with no air pockets, or it will break apart on unmoulding. Let it stand five minutes out of the oven before turning out.
- Season itBeeton assumes salt and pepper as a matter of course and does not list them. Cold mashed potato is bland and needs a firm hand; taste the mixture before it goes into the mould.
- Flour as binderThe 2 tablespoons of flour per pound thicken the milk and hold the loaf; it will taste raw and pasty if the bake is cut short, so give it the full 20 minutes minimum even when the top browns early.
- YieldA pound of cold potato makes a side dish for three or four.
- Stray line"POTATOES, TO STEAM." at the end is the catchline of the next entry in the original book, not part of these instructions.
Beeton's household books are full of entries like this one, filed under the general heading of using up what the previous dinner left behind — a Victorian kitchen cooked potatoes in quantity and expected the cold remains to reappear rather than go to the pig bucket. The technique is essentially a potato-cake mixture baked in a shape: flour and milk to bind, butter for richness, a mould so the dish arrives at table looking deliberate instead of scraped together. Presentation mattered because a moulded, browned loaf turned out whole reads as a made dish, while the same potato served in a heap reads as leftovers, and much of Beeton's practical authority came from teaching a rising middle-class household to manage that distinction on a limited budget.