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White Potato (Scrub clean and pare thinly)
2. Scrub clean and pare thinly. 3. Drop into boiling water and boil gently until soft (test with fork or knitting needle.) 4. Salt when half done. 5. When done drain off every drop of water and shake over the fire until dry. 6. Serve very hot with meat, gravy or butter.
Mashed Potatoes. 6 potatoes 1 t. salt. 3 T. butter spk. pepper.
C. (?) milk. 1. Mash or press hot, boiled potatoes through a ricer. 2. Add butter, salt, pepper and enough hot milk to moisten. dish. 3. Beat until light and creamy and pile lightly in a hot 4. Serve hot.
Creamed Potatoes. 2 T. butter 2 T. flour 1/4 t. salt 1 C. milk 2 C. diced cooked potatoes spk. pepper 1. Melt butter in sauce pan, being careful not to scorch the butter. 2. Add flour, salt, pepper and stir until smooth. 3. Place on fire and let it cook until it bubbles. 4. Add milk and boil two minutes, stirring constantly. If too thick, add more milk. 5. Add potatoes. Re-heat, garnish with parsley and serve.
Three lessons in one: boiled potatoes, then the two things a domestic-science class was expected to do with them. The abbreviations are the standard shorthand of school cookery texts.
- Reading the shorthandt. is a teaspoon, T. a tablespoon, C. a cup, and spk. is a speck — less than an eighth of a teaspoon, essentially a pinch. The "C. (?)" in the mashed potato list means the quantity is illegible or uncertain in the source; work up from about 1/2 cup of hot milk for six potatoes and stop when the mash holds its shape.
- The knitting needleA fine skewer or a thin paring knife does the same job. The point is a probe slender enough not to break the potato apart; the recipe allows a fork as the alternative.
- SaltingThis recipe salts at the halfway mark, but salting the water from the start seasons more evenly and does nothing to slow cooking. Figure roughly a tablespoon of salt per four quarts.
- Drying over the fireThis is the step that matters. Drain completely, return the pan to low heat and shake for 30 to 60 seconds until the surfaces go chalky-dry. Steam driven off now is milk and butter absorbed later; skip it and the mash turns slack.
- Ricer, not beaterRice or mash while the potatoes are still hot, and beat only until light. A food processor or stand mixer ruptures the starch cells and gives a gluey paste — the one failure this recipe cannot recover from.
- Hot milkCold milk chills the potato and stiffens the mash, so scald it first. Warm the serving dish too, as instructed; mashed potato loses heat fast once it is piled loosely.
- The creamed potato sauceEqual butter and flour cooked until it bubbles is a plain white sauce; two tablespoons of each to a cup of milk gives a medium thickness. Cook the roux a full minute before the milk goes in to lose the raw-flour taste, and add the milk gradually to avoid lumps.
- YieldSix potatoes mashed serves four to six. The creamed version, at two cups of diced potato, serves three or four as a side.
Manuals like this one belong to the household-arts movement that moved cooking into American public school classrooms from the 1890s onward, and the format shows it: numbered steps, weighed and measured lists, abbreviations meant to be copied into a notebook. The specification "white potato" distinguishes it from the sweet potato, which older cookbooks treated as a separate vegetable altogether rather than a variant. Whatever the reason potatoes turn up this early, they are cheap, available year-round, and the three recipes build on one another, since the boiled potato becomes the mashed potato and the leftover boiled potato becomes the creamed one. The white sauce in the third recipe is the same foundation these books used for creamed onions, creamed codfish and scalloped dishes generally, so a student who learned it here learned a dozen suppers at once.