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Potato Cream Pie
1 pound of mashed potatoes. 8 ounces of white sugar. 6 ounces of butter. 5 eggs 1 cupful of mixed milk and brandy or wine Boil good mealy potatoes and mash them through a seive. Mix the butter with them while warm, then the sugar, milk and flavoring. Separate the eggs and beat both yolks and whites quite light and stir them in just before baking. Bake in crusts. Sift powdered sugar over when done.
A professional bakeshop formula given in weights, essentially a potato pudding baked in pastry. The texture depends entirely on how the potatoes are handled while hot.
- Potato handling is the hingePush the potatoes through a sieve or ricer while they are still steaming hot, and work in the butter immediately. Cold or over-worked potato turns gluey and the filling bakes dense and gummy rather than custardy.
- Choose the right potato"Good mealy potatoes" means a starchy type — russet or a floury white — not a waxy red or new potato. The recipe says to boil them; boiling them whole in the skin keeps them from taking on water, since a wet mash will make a slack filling.
- Weights, not cups1 lb mashed potato is roughly 2 cups packed, 8 oz sugar about 1 1/4 cups, 6 oz butter 1 1/2 sticks. The recipe is given in weights, and weighing gives a far more reliable result here than measuring by volume.
- The cupful of liquidOne cupful is taken as 8 fl oz of milk and spirit combined. The recipe says brandy or wine and gives no ratio; something on the order of three parts milk to one part spirit keeps the filling from being harsh or too loose, as all brandy would be.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A custard-style pie of this kind wants a moderate oven, 350F, after the crust has had a hotter start; much above that and the eggs curdle and weep.
- The crust"Bake in crusts" assumes an unbaked shell. Because the filling is heavy and wet, blind-baking the shell to a pale set first will help keep the bottom from staying raw.
- Eggs in lastWhites and yolks are beaten separately and folded in immediately before baking for lift. Fold gently and get the pies into the oven at once; the aeration collapses if the batter stands.
- Yield and donenessRoughly enough for two 9-inch pies. They are done when the edge is set and the centre still shivers slightly; it firms as it cools. The recipe sifts powdered sugar over as soon as the pies come out of the oven.
Sweet potato pudding in a pastry case is older than it looks: English cookery books of the eighteenth century, Hannah Glasse's among them, carry potato puddings enriched with butter, eggs, sugar and sack or brandy, and similar puddings appear in American books alongside the better-known sweet potato pie of the South. The arithmetic here — a flat pound of potato, ounces of sugar and butter — scales cleanly to whatever number of pies are wanted. Cooked potato is cheap, it stretches expensive eggs, and it holds moisture.