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Irish Potato Custard
1 cup boiled and mashed potatoes. 1/2 cup cream. 2 egg yolks. 1/2 cup sugar. A little nutmeg.
Put in pastry and bake. Make meringue. This makes one large custard. Sweet potatoes may be used the same way.
All berry pies are made in the same way, some requiring more sugar than others. Blackberries and raspberries are put in pastry before cooking, also cherries. Gooseberries and pie plant must be heated to boiling point and strained, then seasoned.
A one-pie custard built on mashed potato, written in the compressed shorthand of a period cookbook that assumed you already knew how to line a plate and whip a meringue. The instructions for berry pies tacked on the end belong to other recipes entirely and can be ignored here.
- The hinge: texture of the potatoGrainy or lumpy potato ruins this. Press the hot boiled potato through a ricer or fine sieve, measure the cup after ricing, and beat it into the cream while still warm so it disperses rather than sitting in flecks.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A custard pie in an unbaked shell is normally started hot, around 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then dropped to 325-350F until the filling is just set with a slight wobble at the centre, roughly 30-40 minutes more.
- Cream"cream" in a period American recipe could mean anything from top-of-the-bottle milk to thick cream, so the intended richness is uncertain; something near modern heavy or light cream is a reasonable reading. Half-and-half works and gives a lighter set; skim milk will not.
- The meringueTwo whites are left over from the yolks; beat them with about 4 tablespoons of sugar to firm peaks, spread to the crust edge to seal, and brown at 350F for 12-15 minutes. Meringue goes on after the custard is set, not before.
- "Pie plant"In the trailing notes, pie plant is rhubarb. The stalks only, never the leaves, which contain enough oxalic acid to be genuinely poisonous.
- Nutmeg"A little" from a whole nutmeg on a grater is a good deal more aromatic than the pre-ground tin. Roughly a quarter teaspoon freshly grated is plenty for this quantity.
- Yield"one large custard" means a single pie, probably around 9 or 10 inches, six to eight slices. The filling is on the shallow side for a deep dish.
- Sweet potato versionThe substitution works, but sweet potato brings its own sugar. Cut the half cup of sugar back by a third and taste the filling before it goes into the shell.
The name distinguishes the white or "Irish" potato from the sweet potato, an American usage that dates back well into the nineteenth century and survives on grocery signage still. Potato-based sweet pies and puddings are older still, common in British and Irish cookery books, and the sweet potato pie of the American South belongs to the same family. The stray sentences about berry pies at the end suggest these books were often set from working notes, with one entry running into the next.