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Mashed Potatoes
Wash and pare the potatoes; cut into pieces of uniform size, cover with boiling salted water and boil for five minutes. Place in cooker for an hour or an hour and a half, depending upon the size of the pieces and amount in the kettle; drain, mash, add salt, pepper, milk and butter. Beat until smooth.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the potatoes get a brief hard boil on the range, then finish in an insulated box on stored heat. The method still works, but the timings only make sense if you understand the vessel.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated wooden or metal chest, sometimes fitted with soapstone or iron discs heated red on the stove, into which a covered kettle of boiling food was sealed to coast to doneness. Nothing is added to the heat once the lid closes, so the hour to hour and a half is a slow decline from boiling, not sustained cooking.
- On a modern stoveCut potatoes of uniform size are tender in 15 to 20 minutes of ordinary simmering. If you want to reproduce the fireless effect, a heavy pot brought to a full boil, covered and wrapped in towels inside a cooler will hold heat for some time, though how long depends on the pot, the quantity and the insulation.
- Keep it hotThe preliminary five-minute boil appears to be there to load the kettle with as much heat as it will carry. Preheat the cooker, fill the kettle nearly full, and seal it immediately; a half-empty pot or a slow transfer drops the temperature below the useful range and can leave the pieces underdone at the centre.
- Choice of potatoMash wants a mealy potato — russet or a similar starchy variety. Waxy red or new potatoes hold their shape and turn slick rather than fluffy when beaten.
- Drain and dryAfter the long covered hold the pieces will be wet. Drain them and return the pan to a low burner for a minute to steam off surface moisture before mashing, or the mash will be loose no matter how little milk goes in.
- Milk and butterWarm the milk. Cold liquid stiffens the starch and cools the dish. Figure roughly 1/4 cup milk and 1 to 2 tablespoons butter per pound of potatoes, adjusted to taste.
- Beat until smooth, but not long"Beat until smooth" would have been done by hand, with a masher or ricer and a spoon rather than a machine. A food processor or a hard turn in a stand mixer ruptures the starch cells and produces paste; a ricer or masher and a few brisk strokes is the safer route.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Three pounds of potatoes serves six generously.
Fireless cookery was a serious domestic movement in the first quarter of the twentieth century, promoted as a way to save fuel, keep the kitchen cool in summer, and let a woman leave the house while dinner finished itself. Homemade versions — a packing crate lined with hay, newspaper or excelsior, the so-called haybox — circulated widely in extension bulletins and household magazines, and manufactured cookers with soapstone heat discs were sold commercially. Interest ran high around the food and fuel conservation campaigns of the First World War. Where a general cookbook of this period carries a separate fireless section, it suggests a fair number of readers were expected to own such a cooker, and mashed potatoes appear there because they are exactly the sort of long-tolerant, low-attention dish the box was good at: nothing to scorch, nothing to watch.