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Potatoes (Medium-sized potatoes large)
4 medium-sized potatoes 1 large tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons milk Boil the potatoes and drain them thoroughly; mash and beat with a wire beater until light; add the butter, salt and milk. heated. Serve at once if possible. If obliged to keep them stand. ing do not put a cover on the saucepan as steam makes them soggy. Stand over a kettle of hot water and when ready to serve put them, mound fashion, in a hot dish and sprinkle the top lightly with pepper.
A plain mashed potato, and the instructions are almost entirely about texture. The proportions are lean by modern standards, so taste before serving.
- The hingeDrain thoroughly and let the potatoes steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing. Water left in the potato is what makes mash gluey and dilute, and no amount of butter fixes it.
- A wire beaterThis is a hand whisk or a coiled wire masher, not an electric mixer. A ricer or food mill gives the lightest result; a stand mixer or blender overworks the starch and turns the potatoes to paste.
- Butter and milk"One large tablespoon" of butter is roughly 15-20 g depending on how generously it is heaped, and 4 tablespoons of milk is 1/4 cup. Warm the milk before adding, as the original seems to intend with "heated" - cold liquid cools and stiffens the mash. Modern mash recipes generally call for more of both.
- Uncovered holdingThe advice is sound. A lid traps condensation that drips back into the potatoes. Holding the pan over simmering water, uncovered, keeps them hot without steaming them slack.
- Potato choiceA floury potato - russet, King Edward, Maris Piper - mashes light. Waxy new potatoes will not, whatever you do to them.
- YieldFour medium potatoes, roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, serves three to four as a side dish.
Mashed potato appears in many American household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the interest in a page like this is not the dish but the fussing: by 1900 cookery writers commonly treated lightness as the mark of a properly made mash, and wrote at length about beating, draining and holding. The instruction to mound the potatoes in a hot dish and dust the top with pepper is consistent with the period's table conventions, when even the simplest vegetable was often expected to arrive shaped and garnished rather than merely spooned out.